Neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Astrocytes are a major cell type in the central nervous system. Using single cell transcriptome sequencing, the authors identify multiple astrocyte subtypes in the adult mouse CNS, which map to distinct spatial locations and show correlations to cell morphology and physiology.

    • Mykhailo Y. Batiuk
    • , Araks Martirosyan
    •  & Matthew G. Holt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about von Economo neurons, which have been described in a subset of mammals and appear to be selectively lost in several human neurological diseases. Here, authors reveal the gene expression profile of these cells and show that they are likely long-distance projection neurons.

    • Rebecca D. Hodge
    • , Jeremy A. Miller
    •  & Ed S. Lein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many animals show individual left/right biases in motor behaviour, but underlying neural substrates have proven elusive. Here the authors describe neurons that maintain individual, context-dependent lateralisation of swimming behaviour in zebrafish.

    • Eric J. Horstick
    • , Yared Bayleyen
    •  & Harold A. Burgess

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors construct quantitative models of human brain activity evoked by 103 cognitive tasks and reveal the organization of diverse cognitive functions in the brain. Their model, which uses latent cognitive features, predicts brain activity and decodes tasks, even under novel task conditions.

    • Tomoya Nakai
    •  & Shinji Nishimoto

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sex and the APOE ε4 genotype are important risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In the current study, the authors investigate how sex and APOE ε4 genotype modify the association between Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and metabolites in serum.

    • Matthias Arnold
    • , Kwangsik Nho
    •  & Gabi Kastenmüller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The roots of psychopathology take shape during adverse parent-infant interactions, shown through infant attachment quality. Using rodents, the authors show that blunted infant cortical processing of the mother determines attachment quality through a stress hormone-dependent mechanism.

    • Maya Opendak
    • , Emma Theisen
    •  & Regina M. Sullivan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors compare receptive fields and nonlinearities of synaptic inputs, membrane potentials, and spiking activity in the auditory cortex for broadband stimuli revealing distinct differences, which lead to an increase in feature selectivity from neuron input to output. Frequency selectivity is distinctly higher for spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) than for tonal receptive fields (TRFs).

    • Kyunghee X. Kim
    • , Craig A. Atencio
    •  & Christoph E. Schreiner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In vivo reprogramming of reactive glia using transfection of a single transcription factor has been described before by these authors and applied to models of neurodegeneration. Here the authors use this procedure in the R6/2 mouse model of Huntington’s disease, targeting astrocytes in the striatum, converting them to GABAergic neurons.

    • Zheng Wu
    • , Matthew Parry
    •  & Gong Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although micro(mi)RNA-based post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms have been implicated in the assembly and modulation of synaptic connections, few miRNAs have been identified that control synapse formation. Here, authors performed an unbiased screen for novel regulators of synapse morphogenesis at the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction and discovered that miR-34 inhibits Nrx-IV to influence active zone formation, whereas, postsynaptic miR-34 inhibits Hts to regulate the initiation of bouton formation from presynaptic terminals.

    • Elizabeth M. McNeill
    • , Chloe Warinner
    •  & David Van Vactor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is not yet clear how ubiquitously-expressed proteins can cause the selective degeneration of particular populations of neurons, such as in spinocerebellar ataxia type 17, SCA17, which results from a CAG trinucleotide repeat expansion in the ubiquitously expressed transcription factor TBP. Here, the authors show that mutant TBP suppresses the cerebellum-enriched transcription of Inpp5a and link altered levels of INPP5A to the selective degeneration of cerebellar neurons.

    • Qiong Liu
    • , Shanshan Huang
    •  & Shihua Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors use a combination of perceptual decision making in rats and computational modeling to explore the interplay of priors and sensory cues. They find that rats can learn to either alternate or repeat their actions based on reward likelihood and the influence of bias on their actions disappears after making an error.

    • Ainhoa Hermoso-Mendizabal
    • , Alexandre Hyafil
    •  & Jaime de la Rocha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    That attention is a rhythmic process has received abundant evidence. Here, the authors reveal the natural sampling rate of auditory and visual periodic temporal attention. Both are antagonistically modulated by overt motor activity, a result generalised in a dynamical model of coupled oscillators.

    • Arnaud Zalta
    • , Spase Petkoski
    •  & Benjamin Morillon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Denervation of muscle fibres induces muscle atrophy, via mechanisms that remain unclear. Here, the authors show that binding of acetylcoline to its receptor at the neuromuscular junction represses the expression of connexins 43 and 45, which promote atrophy, and is sufficient to prevent denervation-induced loss of myofibre mass.

    • Bruno A. Cisterna
    • , Aníbal A. Vargas
    •  & Juan C. Sáez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding the underlying mechanisms behind the successes of deep networks remains a challenge. Here, the author demonstrates an implicit regularization in training deep networks, showing that the control of complexity in the training is hidden within the optimization technique of gradient descent.

    • Tomaso Poggio
    • , Qianli Liao
    •  & Andrzej Banburski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Isolation during critical periods of development prevents development of normal social behaviours in mice, and this is thought to involve the prefrontal cortex. Here, the authors identify an activation pattern in parvalbumin-positive interneurons in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex that when activated promotes sociability behaviours in mice.

    • Lucy K. Bicks
    • , Kazuhiko Yamamuro
    •  & Hirofumi Morishita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neurotransmitter:sodium symporters (NSS) serve as targets for drugs including antidepressants and psychostimulants. Here authors report the X-ray structure of the prokaryotic NSS member, LeuT, in a Na+/substrate-bound, inward-facing occluded conformation which is a key intermediate in the LeuT transport cycle.

    • Kamil Gotfryd
    • , Thomas Boesen
    •  & Ulrik Gether

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The regulation of cellular neuronal properties distinct from synaptic plasticity has been proposed as a mechanism of functional network organization. Here, the authors show that the magnitude of five ion currents in basal ganglia projection song system forebrain neurons covary across life, rapidly and dynamically relating to learned features of individual zebra finches’ songs.

    • Arij Daou
    •  & Daniel Margoliash

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hypoxic brain damage associated with premature birth causes lasting neurological impairments. Here, the authors use environmental enrichment to rescue white matter dysmaturation following hypoxia, while identifying a critical window of intervention and oligodendrocyte-specific changes in gene expression.

    • Thomas A. Forbes
    • , Evan Z. Goldstein
    •  & Vittorio Gallo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Autonomic dysfunction is a feature of some α-synucleinopathies, but there are no models of pure autonomic dysfunction associated with α-synuclein. Here the authors describe a mouse model of pure autonomic dysfunction without motor dysfunciton by injection of pre-formed fibrils of α-synuclein to the stellate and celiac ganglia.

    • Xue-Jing Wang
    • , Ming-Ming Ma
    •  & Xue-Bing Ding

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural circuits through which the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) exerts its role in epilepsy control are not known. Here the authors reveal that a long-range SNr-parafascicular nucleus disinhibitory circuit participates in regulating seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy and inhibition of this circuit can alleviate severity of epileptic seizures.

    • Bin Chen
    • , Cenglin Xu
    •  & Zhong Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The prefrontal attention spotlight dynamically explores space at 7–12 Hz, enhancing sensory encoding and behavior, in the absence of eye movements. This alpha-clocked sampling of space is under top-down control and implements an alternation in exploration and exploitation of the visual environment.

    • Corentin Gaillard
    • , Sameh Ben Hadj Hassen
    •  & Suliann Ben Hamed

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Schizophrenia is associated with brain ventricular enlargement. Here, the authors show in mice that 22q11 deletion, which is associated with schizophrenia, causes ventricular enlargement and motility abnormalities in cilia lining ventricle walls via a microRNA mechanism.

    • Tae-Yeon Eom
    • , Seung Baek Han
    •  & Stanislav S. Zakharenko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Low-intensity ultrasound can be used for neuromodulation in vivo, but it has poor spatial confinement and can result in unwanted cochlear pathway activation. Here the authors use the optoacoustic effect to generate spatially confined ultrasound waves to activate neurons within a 500 μm radius in the mouse brain.

    • Ying Jiang
    • , Hyeon Jeong Lee
    •  & Ji-Xin Cheng

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the human dopamine system changes during adolescence is still unclear. Here, the authors combine PET and quantitative MRI measures to show that dopamine D2/D3 receptor availability decreases with age while presynaptic dopamine vesicular storage was developmentally stable by age 18

    • Bart Larsen
    • , Valur Olafsson
    •  & Beatriz Luna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual features are streamed into higher visual areas (HVAs), but how representations in HVAs are built, based on retinal output channels, is unknown. Here, the authors show that specific connectivity of cortical neurons routes retina-originated direction-selective signaling into distinct HVAs.

    • Rune Rasmussen
    • , Akihiro Matsumoto
    •  & Keisuke Yonehara

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are normally not aware that their eyes are always in motion, even when attempting to maintain steady gaze on a point. Here the authors show that these small eye movements are finely controlled and contribute more than two lines in a standard eye-chart test of visual acuity.

    • Janis Intoy
    •  & Michele Rucci

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the brain represents 3D space is poorly understood but important for understanding spatial cognition. Here the authors record place cells in rats climbing through a 3D environment and report that they represent this space with 3D fields that are elongated along the axes of the environment and encode the vertical dimension less accurately.

    • Roddy M. Grieves
    • , Selim Jedidi-Ayoub
    •  & Kate J. Jeffery

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural activity space or manifold that represents object information changes across the layers of a deep neural network. Here the authors present a theoretical account of the relationship between the geometry of the manifolds and the classification capacity of the neural networks.

    • Uri Cohen
    • , SueYeon Chung
    •  & Haim Sompolinsky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Voluntary action and free will have been associated with cortical activity, referred to as “the readiness potential” that precedes self-initiated actions by about 1 s. Here, the authors show that the involuntary and cyclic motor act of breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the readiness potential.

    • Hyeong-Dong Park
    • , Coline Barnoud
    •  & Olaf Blanke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear whether the functional organization of the visual cortex is shaped by genetic or environmental factors. Using fMRI in twins (n = 424), these authors show that activation patterns in category-selective areas are heritable, and that the genetic effects in these areas are linked to structural properties of cortical tissue.

    • Nooshin Abbasi
    • , John Duncan
    •  & Reza Rajimehr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The integration of synaptic inputs onto dendrites provides the basis for neuronal computation. Here the authors perform two-photon dendritic imaging with a genetically-encoded glutamate sensor in awake monkeys, and map the excitatory synaptic inputs on dendrites of individual V1 superficial layer neurons with high spatial and temporal resolution.

    • Niansheng Ju
    • , Yang Li
    •  & Shiming Tang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this longitudinal study, the authors tracked the course of brain development from birth to adolescence (age 13 years) and examined the effects of very preterm birth. Very preterm children showed slower brain growth from age 0 (term equivalent) to age 7.

    • Deanne K. Thompson
    • , Lillian G. Matthews
    •  & Peter J. Anderson

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