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Gage and colleagues show that dentate granule cells undergo experience-dependent homeostatic dendritic pruning—illustrated here by the arboreal shearing of the castigating tailor from Heinrich Hoffman's 19th-century German children's book Struwwelpeter. Artwork by Veronika Mertens.p 788
Our understanding of faces reflects both our perception of their facial features and our social knowledge. This interaction of stereotypes and vision can be observed in brain signals in fusiform gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex.
The brain cancer glioblastoma relies on aberrant epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFRvIII) signaling for tumorigenesis. An essential co-receptor and feed-forward circuit maintain signaling in this deadly disease.
In high-throughput electron microscopy, a simple method to reduce artifacts helps reveal the architecture of circuits in the developing zebrafish olfactory bulb.
Researchers show that orbitofrontal neurons perform the same value-related computations across different decisions. Value computations are therefore a critical feature around which orbitofrontal representations are organized.
Pericytes are vascular mural cells embedded in the basement membrane of brain microvessels that, in the CNS, are uniquely positioned in the neurovascular unit between endothelial cells, astrocytes and neurons. Here the authors examine the key signaling pathways between pericytes and their neighboring cells regulating CNS functions in health and disease.
The authors document a novel neurogenic mechanism to explain the clinical syndrome known as spinal cord injury–induced immune deficiency. Specifically, they show that new spinal–splenic sympathetic circuitry forms below the level of injury, creating an exaggerated sympathetic anti-inflammatory reflex. Inhibiting excitatory interneurons within this circuitry blocks immune suppression.
In this study the authors have imaged the growth of adult-born dentate granule cell dendrites in vivo longitudinally over several weeks. They have found that branch addition is dependent on behavioral experience and molecular cues and that pruning acts homeostatically to promote a similar dendritic structure for all granule cells.
Theories propose hippocampal memories are consolidated to the cortex during reactivation events known as replay. However, the involvement of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) in consolidation remains poorly understood. Ólafsdóttir et al. demonstrate coordinated replay between the hippocampus and MEC, with hippocampus leading, suggesting hippocampal memories are broadcast to MEC.
By combining neuroimaging with an implicit behavioral measure (mouse-tracking), the authors demonstrate that stereotypes can alter the brain's visual representation of a face's gender, race, and emotion. Perceptions of social categories were biased by a subject's stereotypical associations, and this bias correlated with neural representations of those categories.
Glioblastoma is a deadly brain tumor with no cure. The cytokine receptor OSMR is identified as a new key player in glioblastoma pathogenesis. OSMR orchestrates a feed-forward mechanism with the oncogenic protein EGFRvIII and the transcription factor STAT3 to drive oncogenesis. Loss of OSMR impairs EGFRvIII-STAT3 signaling and glioblastoma tumorigenesis.
The authors reveal that PTB and its homolog nPTB mediate two sequential RNA regulatory loops required for converting human adult fibroblasts to functional neurons, and likely required for neurogenesis in vivo. The first loop, PTB–miR-124–REST, controls initial neuronal conversion and the second, nPTB–miR-9–BRN2, is responsible for neuronal maturation.
The authors used new 3D electron microscopy techniques and analyses to reconstruct virtually all neurons in the olfactory bulb of a zebrafish larva. The results reveal specific patterns of projections between the functional modules of the olfactory bulb, the glomeruli. This network provides an anatomical basis for distributed olfactory computations.
Hyperpolarization and cyclic-nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels shape synaptic integration in the soma and dendrites of many neurons. Here, Ko et al. show that in auditory neurons HCN channels are also present in the axon initial segment, where they influence spike probability and also serve as potent sites for neuromodulation.
The authors show that a gene expression switch operated by microRNAs regulates the control of puberty onset and adult fertility by the CNS by triggering increased hypothalamic Gnrh mRNA expression during the infantile period of postnatal development.
Midbrain dopamine neurons have been implicated in two related but distinct processes: reward learning and action generation. By combining an operant learning task in mice with recordings from projection-defined dopamine neurons, the authors found that dopamine neurons targeting different parts of the striatum carry different information about rewards and chosen actions.
Different neurons in orbitofrontal cortex encode the input and the output of economic decisions. The authors demonstrate that this neural circuit is both stable and flexible. When different goods are available for choice, individual neurons adapt to the new behavioral context while preserving their function in the decision circuit.
