Neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    APOE is the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. In a large number of neuropathologically confirmed cases and controls, the impact of different APOE genotypes on Alzheimer’s dementia risk was greater than previously thought and APOE2 homozygotes had an exceptionally low risk.

    • Eric M. Reiman
    • , Joseph F. Arboleda-Velasquez
    •  & Yi Zhao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Memories are encoded within neuronal ensembles activated during learning. Here the authors show that DNA methylation within neuronal ensembles contributes to the stability of the memory trace, and increases the likelihood of neuronal ensemble reactivation during retrieval.

    • Kubra Gulmez Karaca
    • , Janina Kupke
    •  & Ana M. M. Oliveira

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The mechanisms underlying the maturation of learning and memory abilities are poorly understood. Here, authors show that episodic learning produces persistent neuronal activation, BDNF-dependent increase in excitatory synapse markers (synaptophysin and PSD-95), and significant maturation of AMPA receptor synaptic responses in the hippocampus of infant rats and mice compared to juveniles and adults.

    • Benjamin Bessières
    • , Alessio Travaglia
    •  & Cristina M. Alberini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal populations in the temporal cortex fire show increased activity in response to face stimuli. Here, the authors show using human intracranial recordings that face perception involves anatomically discrete but temporally distributed response profiles in the human ventral temporal cortex.

    • Jessica Schrouff
    • , Omri Raccah
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The molecular mechanisms regulating adult neural stem/progenitor cell differentiation following damage of the central nervous system are unclear. Here, the authors show that fibrinogen is a regulator of the adult neural stem/progenitor cell switch from neurogenesis to astrogenesis in a model of stroke

    • Lauriane Pous
    • , Sachin S. Deshpande
    •  & Christian Schachtrup

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Food intake can be attenuated by visceral aversive stimuli in pathological conditions. Here the authors identify a unilateral neural circuit from the CamKII-positive neurons in the anterior insular cortex to the vGluT2-positive neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that controls feeding responses to visceral aversive stimuli.

    • Yu Wu
    • , Changwan Chen
    •  & Shuang Qiu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Synaptic organizers are cell-adhesion molecules capable of inducing synaptic differentiation through transsynaptic interactions. Here the authors present the crystal structure of the intracellular interaction between the synaptic organizer PTPδ and Liprin-α to reveal the structural mechanism of intracellular molecular interactions for IIa-RPTP-mediated synapse formation.

    • Maiko Wakita
    • , Atsushi Yamagata
    •  & Shuya Fukai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Measures of neural processing can be obtained non-invasively from all areas of the human brain but one, the olfactory bulb. Here, the authors show that signals obtained from EEG electrodes at the nasal bridge represent responses from the human olfactory bulb, the so-called Electrobulbogram.

    • Behzad Iravani
    • , Artin Arshamian
    •  & Johan N. Lundström

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In vivo recordings of free-moving Drosophila neural activity are limited to clearly-separated flies in a stable focal plane. Here the authors improved on their Flyception imaging system to remove these constraints, and image neural activity in the male fly brain during various stages of the mating sequence.

    • Dhruv Grover
    • , Takeo Katsuki
    •  & Ralph J. Greenspan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    UDP-glucuronic acid is a component of the extracellular matrix. Here, the authors report biallelic variants in the gene encoding UDP-Glucose 6-Dehydrogenase (UGDH) in individuals affected by developmental epileptic encephalopathies that impair UGDH stability, oligomerization, or enzymatic activity in vitro.

    • Holger Hengel
    • , Célia Bosso-Lefèvre
    •  & Bruno Reversade

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extensive research in primates shows that attention to space improves behavioural performance as well as neural responses to stimuli in that location. Here, the authors establish a visual spatial attention task in mice and report on attentional modulation of behaviour, as well as neural correlates from subthreshold responses in single cells to spikes and LFP at network level.

    • Anderson Speed
    • , Joseph Del Rosario
    •  & Bilal Haider

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The precise mechanisms of neuronal cell death in neurodegeneration are not fully understood. Here the authors show that YAP-mediated neuronal necrosis is increased in pre-symptomatic stages of Alzheimer’s disease and intervention to the necrosis rescues extracellular Aβ aggregation and symptoms in a mouse model.

    • Hikari Tanaka
    • , Hidenori Homma
    •  & Hitoshi Okazawa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Protein AMPylation is a post-translational modification whose implications in cellular physiology are not fully understood. Here the authors develop a cell-permeable AMPylation probe and use it to identify new AMP modified proteins and investigate the role of FICD in neuronal differentiation using cerebral organoids.

    • Pavel Kielkowski
    • , Isabel Y. Buchsbaum
    •  & Stephan A. Sieber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, authors present results of a hiPSC transcriptomics study on corticogenesis from multiple donors across four transitions in differentiation. They present a bulk data deconvolution method and show that co-culturing human NPCs with rodent astrocytes results in mutually synergistic maturation.

    • Emily E. Burke
    • , Joshua G. Chenoweth
    •  & Andrew E. Jaffe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often fail to perceive the second of two brief visual targets, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Here the authors modelled behaviour and brain activity to show that the AB arises from short- and long-range interactions between representations of elementary visual features.

    • Matthew F. Tang
    • , Lucy Ford
    •  & Jason B. Mattingley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    AgRP-expressing neurons regulate feeding, glucose homeostasis and locomotor activity, but the neurotransmitters that mediate these effects are unclear. Here the authors show that neuropeptide Y in these neurons regulates rapid feeding responses and insulin sensitivity, but not locomotor activity.

    • Linda Engström Ruud
    • , Mafalda M. A. Pereira
    •  & Jens C. Brüning

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learned conditioned fear associations can be weakened (extinction learning), but extinction is less effective if performed too soon after the original fear conditioning. Here, the authors show that persistent activation of CRF-expressing neurons in the central amygdala is involved in the early fear extinction deficit.

    • Yong S. Jo
    • , Vijay Mohan K. Namboodiri
    •  & Larry S. Zweifel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In this study the authors identify a possible link between the gene FAM222A and brain atrophy. The protein it encodes is found to accumulate in plaques seen in Alzheimer’s disease, and functional analysis suggests it interacts with amyloid-beta.

    • Tingxiang Yan
    • , Jingjing Liang
    •  & Xinglong Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Precapillary sphincters are mural cells encircling an indentation of blood vessels where capillaries branch off from penetrating arterioles (PAs), but their existence and role in the brain is not fully understood. Here authors describe these structures at PAs in the cortex and show that they constrict during cortical spreading depolarization in mice.

    • Søren Grubb
    • , Changsi Cai
    •  & Martin Lauritzen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mechanisms behind molecular transport from cerebrospinal fluid to dural lymphatic vessels remain unknown. This study demonstrates that trans-arachnoid molecular passage does occur and suggests that parasagittal dura may serve as a bridging link between human brain and dural lymphatic vessels.

    • Geir Ringstad
    •  & Per Kristian Eide

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Auditory contrast gain control helps us perceive sounds as constant despite changes in the environment or background noise. Here, the authors show that neurons in the auditory thalamus and midbrain of mice display independent contrast gain control, not just the cortex as previously thought.

    • Michael Lohse
    • , Victoria M. Bajo
    •  & Ben D. B. Willmore

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The biology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains unknown. We propose AD is a protein connectivity-based dysfunction disorder whereby a switch of the chaperome into epichaperomes rewires proteome-wide connectivity, leading to brain circuitry malfunction that can be corrected by novel therapeutics.

    • Maria Carmen Inda
    • , Suhasini Joshi
    •  & Gabriela Chiosis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Brain imaging studies suggest that specific, large-scale, cortical networks show antagonistic activity with one another. Here, the authors studied the dynamics of these networks using implanted electrodes in the human brain, revealing that the coordination of inter-network dynamics on fast time scales relates to fluctuations in attention.

    • Aaron Kucyi
    • , Amy Daitch
    •  & Josef Parvizi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The understanding of the changes regulating gene expression relevant for the emergence of the human brain and its susceptibility to disease is limited. Here, the authors identified a set of regulatory elements that evolved in hominins affecting oligodendrocyte function, and link these to autism.

    • Bas Castelijns
    • , Mirna L. Baak
    •  & Menno P. Creyghton

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Realistic simulations of neurons and neural networks are key for understanding neural computations. Here the authors describe Neuron_Reduce, an analytic approach to simplify neurons receiving thousands of synapses and accelerate their simulations by 40–250 folds, while preserving voltage dynamics and dendritic computations.

    • Oren Amsalem
    • , Guy Eyal
    •  & Idan Segev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Male orchid bees collect scents from the environment to attract females for mating. Here, Brand et al. combine population genomic, perfume chemistry, and functional analyses to show how divergence in odorant receptor genes may be driving reproductive divergence between two orchid bee species.

    • Philipp Brand
    • , Ismael A. Hinojosa-Díaz
    •  & Santiago R. Ramírez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The extracellular regions (ECRs) of adhesion GPCRs have diverse biological functions, but their structures and mechanisms of action remain unclear. Here, the authors solve the ECR structure of the Gpr126 receptor and show that ECR conformation and signaling functions are regulated by alternative splicing.

    • Katherine Leon
    • , Rebecca L. Cunningham
    •  & Demet Araç

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ageing affects several brain areas causing a decrease in cognitive abilities and memory. We find that increasing the endogenous potential of the hippocampus to generate new neurons throughout life rejuvenates learning and memory, indicating that neural reserves can be exploited during ageing to compensate for age- or disease-related cognitive impairments.

    • Gabriel Berdugo-Vega
    • , Gonzalo Arias-Gil
    •  & Federico Calegari

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neurons are subjected to strains due to body movements and their locations within organs and tissues. Here the authors show that UNC-70/β-spectrin and TBC-10 dynamically maintain attachment of the axon within the epidermis non-cell-autonomously by stabilizing hemidesmosome attachment, preventing axon degeneration.

    • Sean Coakley
    • , Fiona K. Ritchie
    •  & Massimo A. Hilliard

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain receives 20% of cardiac output, but in accord with the current knowledge lacks a specialized sensor of its own blood flow. Here, the authors show that brain astrocytes detect drops in perfusion and trigger compensatory increases in arterial pressure and heart rate to preserve brain blood flow and oxygen delivery.

    • Nephtali Marina
    • , Isabel N. Christie
    •  & Alexander V. Gourine

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The increasing amount of raw RNA-seq data calls for new computational methods to mine information. Here, the authors present ASCOT, a computational resource to identify splice variants in RNA-seq data, and apply it to splicing patterns in neurons and unique splicing patterns in rod photoreceptors.

    • Jonathan P. Ling
    • , Christopher Wilks
    •  & Seth Blackshaw

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Targeted manipulations of neural activity in the living brain remain a significant challenge. In this study the authors introduce a paramagnetic analog of the drug muscimol that enables targeted neural inactivation to be performed with feedback from magnetic resonance imaging

    • Sarah Bricault
    • , Ali Barandov
    •  & Alan Jasanoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dopamine neurons are proposed to signal the reward prediction error in model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. Here, the authors show that when given during an associative learning task, optogenetic activation of dopamine neurons causes associative, rather than value, learning.

    • Melissa J. Sharpe
    • , Hannah M. Batchelor
    •  & Geoffrey Schoenbaum

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