Volume 9 Issue 9, September 2006

Mice lacking the background potassium channel TREK-1 show elevated activity of serotonergic neurons and behave as if they have been treated with an antidepressant drug, reports a new study. This suggests that the TREK-1 channel may be a good target for the development of drugs for the treatment of depression.

Spatial attention has been shown to enhance visual processing by increasing the strength of neural responses. A new study suggests that in cortical area MT it also shifts neural receptive fields toward attended targets.

The organization of cortical regions associated with face and object recognition has been controversial. A new study uses high-resolution imaging to find that small intermingled cortical regions are very selective for particular categories.

Can the adult neocortex in primates generate new neurons? A new study uses a clever way of determining the age of postmortem human neurons to conclude that there is very little postnatal cortical neurogenesis—or none at all.

The early pathogenic events leading to neurodegeneration in Huntington disease are not clear. A recent paper shows that mutating a caspase-6 cleavage site in the huntingtin protein is sufficient to prevent pathogenesis.