Neuroscience articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by neurodegeneration associated with loss of dopaminergic (DA) neurons and deposition of Lewy bodies. Here, Wang et al. use co-expression network analysis to pinpoint disease pathways and propose reduced expression of STMN2 as a cause of presynaptic function loss in PD.

    • Qian Wang
    • , Yuanxi Zhang
    •  & Bin Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a sleep phase characterised by random eye movements for which the underlying motor commands are yet to be revealed. The authors describe that a cluster of medulla oblongata neurons in the Nucleus papiliocontributes to the control of eye movements during REM sleep.

    • C. Gutierrez Herrera
    • , F. Girard
    •  & M. R. Celio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Glutamatergic neurons in the mammalian cortex are born from a heterogeneous pool of embryonic progenitors, however, it is unclear how these different progenitors contribute to diversity within the mature cortex. In this study, authors combine in utero progenitor labeling techniques with targeted Patch-Seq methods and high resolution synaptic circuit mapping in the mature mouse cortex to show that intermediate progenitors can generate restricted sets of transcriptomically-defined glutamatergic neurons that have distinct patterns of local and long-range synaptic connections.

    • Tommas J. Ellender
    • , Sophie V. Avery
    •  & Colin J. Akerman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People are able to mentally time travel to distant memories and reflect on the consequences of those past events. Here, the authors show how a mechanism that connects learning from delayed rewards with memory retrieval can enable AI agents to discover links between past events to help decide better courses of action in the future.

    • Chia-Chun Hung
    • , Timothy Lillicrap
    •  & Greg Wayne

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We tend to be more trusting of people who we know to be honest. Here, the authors show using fMRI that honesty-based trustworthiness is represented in the posterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and intraparietal sulcus, and predicts subsequent trust decisions.

    • Gabriele Bellucci
    • , Felix Molter
    •  & Soyoung Q. Park

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The contribution of long-range signaling to cortical gyrification remains poorly understood. In this study, authors demonstrate that the combined genetic loss of transcription factors Lmx1a and Lmx1b, expressed in the telencephalic dorsal midline neuroepithelium and head mesenchyme, respectively, induces gyrification in the mouse neocortex

    • Victor V. Chizhikov
    • , Igor Y. Iskusnykh
    •  & Kathleen J. Millen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In congenitally blind people, tactile stimuli can activate the occipital (visual) cortex. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that occipital activation can occur within 35 ms following tactile stimulation, suggesting the existence of a fast thalamocortical pathway for touch in congenitally blind humans.

    • Franziska Müller
    • , Guiomar Niso
    •  & Ron Kupers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Animals resolve uncertainty by seeking knowledge about the future. How the brain controls this is unclear. The authors show that a network including primate anterior cingulate cortex and basal ganglia encodes opportunities to gain information about uncertain rewards and mediates information seeking.

    • J. Kael White
    • , Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin
    •  & Ilya E. Monosov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain’s capacity to produce new neurons in response to injury is limited. Here, the authors transplant GABAergic progenitor cells and show that they synaptically incorporate into the damaged hippocampus and rescue memory problems and post-traumatic seizures caused by traumatic brain injury.

    • Bingyao Zhu
    • , Jisu Eom
    •  & Robert F. Hunt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Voltage-gated Ca2+ channels are thought to contribute to neurodegeneration of dopaminergic neurons. Here the authors find that the R-type channel Cav2.3 in substantia nigra dopaminergic neurons may contribute to neurodegeneration in a model of Parkinson’s disease, in contrast to the neuroprotective action of the neuronal Ca2+ sensor NCS-1.

    • Julia Benkert
    • , Simon Hess
    •  & Birgit Liss

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Providing efficient and scalable specialized hardware for stochastic neural networks remains a challenge. Here, the authors propose a fast, energy-efficient and scalable stochastic dot-product circuit that may use either of two types of memory devices – metal-oxide memristors and floating-gate memories.

    • M. R. Mahmoodi
    • , M. Prezioso
    •  & D. B. Strukov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rewards can improve stimulus processing in early sensory areas but the underlying neural circuit mechanisms are unknown. Here, the authors build a computational model of layer 2/3 primary visual cortex and suggest that plastic inhibitory circuits change first and then increase excitatory representations beyond the presence of rewards.

    • Katharina Anna Wilmes
    •  & Claudia Clopath

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anatomical brain atlases elucidate the anatomical and functional organisation across species but different atlases have conflicting anatomical border and 3D coordinates. The authors integrated two atlases into a unified and highly segmented anatomical labelling system of the mouse brain.

    • Uree Chon
    • , Daniel J. Vanselow
    •  & Yongsoo Kim

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    The auditory frequency-following response (FFR) indexes the quality of neural sound encoding in the brain. In this Perspective, the authors discuss the potential of the FFR to provide a better understanding of sound encoding in the auditory system and its relationship to behavior.

    • Emily B. J. Coffey
    • , Trent Nicol
    •  & Nina Kraus

  • Article
    | Open Access

    C. elegans sleep can be used to model neural state transitions. Here the authors show that adult C. elegans show quiescent sleep-like behavior when in a microfluidic chamber, and that this is regulated by temperature, mechanosensation and satiety.

    • Daniel L. Gonzales
    • , Jasmine Zhou
    •  & Jacob T. Robinson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings are sensitive to movement and therefore are especially challenging with young participants. Here the authors develop a wearable MEG system based on a modified bicycle helmet, which enables reliable recordings in toddlers, children, teenagers and adults.

    • Ryan M. Hill
    • , Elena Boto
    •  & Matthew J. Brookes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Is there an optimum difficulty level for training? In this paper, the authors show that for the widely-used class of stochastic gradient-descent based learning algorithms, learning is fastest when the accuracy during training is 85%.

    • Robert C. Wilson
    • , Amitai Shenhav
    •  & Jonathan D. Cohen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exaggerated synaptic inhibition is hypothesised to be a main cause of cognitive deficits in Down syndrome models. The authors identify triplication of the kainate receptor encoding gene Grik1 as the cause of memory deficits due to a reorganization of synaptic inhibition along the CA1 dendritic tree.

    • Sergio Valbuena
    • , Álvaro García
    •  & Juan Lerma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Working memory is maintained in the recurrent connectivity of prefrontal neurons; however, distractors lead to a morphing of the population code. Here, the authors show that a low dimensional subspace of activity maintains memory information even with a distractor and can be modeled as a bump attractor.

    • Aishwarya Parthasarathy
    • , Cheng Tang
    •  & Camilo Libedinsky

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although cortical GABAergic interneuron (CIN) dysfunction is implicated in several neuropsychiatric disorders, we still know very little about how they attain their unique properties or how their dysfunction impacts neuropsychiatric disorders. In this study, authors show that conditional loss of Tsc1, causes SST+ CINs, which are distinct from PV+ CINs, to express PV and adopt fast-spiking properties, via MTOR activity

    • Ruchi Malik
    • , Emily Ling-Lin Pai
    •  & Daniel Vogt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite growing interest in the role of autophagy in neurons, it remains unclear how this process is regulated, in particular, how autophagy is spatially restricted in subcellular compartments in neurons. In this study, the authors use an unbiased proteomic approach to show that the autophagy initiating kinase UNC-51/ULK and autophagosome formation are inhibited by the ubiquitin ligase RPM-1, and demonstrate that this interaction is within specific axonal compartments.

    • Oliver Crawley
    • , Karla J. Opperman
    •  & Brock Grill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The temporal resolution of optical measurements of neural activity has traditionally been limited by the image or volume acquisition rate. Here, the authors describe an analysis that exploits the short duration of neural measurements within each image to extract neural responses at higher temporal resolution than the acquisition rate.

    • Omer Mano
    • , Matthew S. Creamer
    •  & Damon A. Clark

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The 302-neuron connectome of the nematode C. elegans has been completely mapped, yet the design principles that explain how the connectome structure determines its function are unknown. Here, the authors show that physical principles of symmetry and mathematical tools of symmetry groups can be used to understand C. elegans neural locomotion circuits.

    • Flaviano Morone
    •  & Hernán A. Makse

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain can often continue to function despite lesions in many areas, but damage to particular locations may have serious effects. Here, the authors use the concept of Ollivier-Ricci curvature to investigate the robustness of brain networks.

    • Hamza Farooq
    • , Yongxin Chen
    •  & Christophe Lenglet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is difficult to fit mechanistic, biophysically constrained circuit models to spike train data from in vivo extracellular recordings. Here the authors present analytical methods that enable efficient parameter estimation for integrate-and-fire circuit models and inference of the underlying connectivity structure in subsampled networks.

    • Josef Ladenbauer
    • , Sam McKenzie
    •  & Srdjan Ostojic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decision-making research has confounded the reward value of options with their goal-congruency, as the task goal was always to pick the most rewarding option. Here, authors separately asked participants to select the least rewarding of a set of options, revealing a dominant role for goal congruency.

    • Romy Frömer
    • , Carolyn K. Dean Wolf
    •  & Amitai Shenhav

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recording from monkey orbitofrontal cortex, the authors used composite reward bundles and found individual neuron and population responses that were suitable for economic choice. The responses followed behavioral indifference curves and predicted behavioral choices consistent with formalisms of Revealed Preference Theory.

    • Alexandre Pastor-Bernier
    • , Arkadiusz Stasiak
    •  & Wolfram Schultz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous studies on astrocyte development have led to controversial results due to a lack of pertinent tools. Here, authors analyze large numbers of astrocyte clones generated by nearby cortical progenitors using the MAGIC Markers strategy and ChroMS 3D imaging, and show that clonally-related astrocytes organize in a non-stereotyped manner and that cortical astrocyte subtypes are not intrinsically specified.

    • Solène Clavreul
    • , Lamiae Abdeladim
    •  & Karine Loulier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cortical responses are highly heterogeneous, making it difficult to describe how they behave as a population. Here, the author overcomes this problem by introducing a geometric approach to study the representation of orientation and its transformation under the presence of a mask.

    • Dario L. Ringach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to perceive moving or changing objects, sensory information must be integrated over time. Here, using a visual sequential metacontrast paradigm, the authors show that integration occurs only when subsequent stimuli are presented within a discrete window of time after the initial stimulus.

    • Leila Drissi-Daoudi
    • , Adrien Doerig
    •  & Michael H. Herzog

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Deposition of tau protein aggregates occurs during aging and Alzheimer disease. Here, the authors show that tau burden in the anterior-temporal memory network is associated with disrupted fMRI connectivity and functional isolation of the hippocampus from other memory network components.

    • Theresa M. Harrison
    • , Anne Maass
    •  & William J. Jagust

  • Article
    | Open Access

    “Genome-wide association studies have identified variants associated with age-related macular degeneration (AMD); however, other than identifying this as a complement mediated inflammatory disease, little biology has emerged. Here, authors used novel computational tools from the Broad Institute to examine the relationship of single-cell transcriptomics and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in the human retina and demonstrate that GWAS-associated risk alleles associated with AMD are enriched in glia and vascular cells and that human retinal glia are more diverse than previously thought

    • Madhvi Menon
    • , Shahin Mohammadi
    •  & Brian P. Hafler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Several cortical association areas have rapidly expanded in size during human evolution, including elements of the central cognitive default mode network (DMN). Here, the authors show that genes highly divergent between humans and other primates (HAR genes) are particularly expressed in these brain regions.

    • Yongbin Wei
    • , Siemon C. de Lange
    •  & Martijn P. van den Heuvel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fragile X syndrome and autism spectrum disorders are associated with circuit hyperexcitability, however, its cellular and synaptic bases are not well understood. Here, the authors report abnormal synaptogenesis with an increased prevalence of polysynaptic spines with normal morphology in a mouse model of fragile X.

    • Sam A. Booker
    • , Aleksander P. F. Domanski
    •  & Peter C. Kind

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Somatosensory hypersensitivity in Fmr-1 knockout mice is thought to arise from an increase in cortical circuit excitability. Here, the authors report that the loss of precision of sensory encoding in the Layer 4 of barrel cortex is the primary developmental circuit alteration that drives the other compensatory circuit dysfunction.

    • Aleksander P. F. Domanski
    • , Sam A. Booker
    •  & Peter C. Kind

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Network activity in primary motor cortex (M1) controls dexterous limb movements. Here, the authors show that the M1 population code varies according to contextual motor demands that are conveyed via the secondary motor cortex (M2).

    • Wolfgang Omlor
    • , Anna-Sophia Wahl
    •  & Fritjof Helmchen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear how myelin is targeted specifically to axons while sparing neuronal cell bodies and dendrites, or how small gaps, the nodes of Ranvier, are left unmyelinated along the axon. In this study, authors used genetic analyses in zebrafish and mice to demonstrate that molecules of the paranodal axo-glial junction act jointly with molecules of the internodal domain to regulate axonal interactions and myelin wrapping, and that in the combined absence of these molecules myelin sheaths are misplaced.

    • Minou Djannatian
    • , Sebastian Timmler
    •  & Mikael Simons

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It’s well known that hippocampal synaptic plasticity and memory are impaired in experimental models of metabolic diseases, however, it is unclear if maternal diet or metabolic alterations around the gestational age may multigenerationally affect learning and memory. In this study, authors demonstrate that maternal high fat diet-dependent insulin resistance affects synaptic plasticity and memory of descendants until the third generation via reduced exon specific brain-derived neurotrophic factor expression in the hippocampus of descendants

    • Salvatore Fusco
    • , Matteo Spinelli
    •  & Claudio Grassi

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