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The locus coeruleus is a nucleus in the pons that plays important roles in homeostasis, arousal and sleep, memory and emotions. Neurons of the locus coeruleus project to numerous brain areas including the spinal cord, cerebellum, hypothalamus, the thalamic relay nuclei, the amygdala, the basal telencephalon, and the cortex.
A real-time analysis system was developed for an up to 500-megabyte-per-second image stream. This system can extract activities from up to 100,000 neurons in larval zebrafish brains and enables closed-loop perturbations of brain-wide neural dynamics at cellular resolution.
Kjaerby and Andersen et al. show that norepinephrine (NE) plays profound roles in shaping sleep micro-architecture. NE slowly oscillates during sleep, with NE oscillatory amplitude being a major determinant of spindle-dependent memory consolidation and awakenings.
Despite its wide and growing use, the mechanisms by which in vivo vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) exerts its therapeutic benefits are still largely unknown. Here, the authors show in mice that pupil dilation is a reliable and noninvasive biosensor for titratable VNS-evoked cortical neuromodulation by acetylcholine.
A method that integrates whole-brain neural activity measurements with cellular-level molecular phenotyping is used to investigate the neuronal populations that modulate a global brain state.
Physiological and optogenetic dissection of discrete locus coeruleus neuronal populations reveals a functional disassociation, with heterogeneous engagement of locus coeruleus neurons in either fear learning or extinction models.
