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Microglial synapse engulfment precedes brain amyloid plaque formation and probably contributes to early cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease. The mechanisms that regulate microglia-mediated synapse engulfment are unclear. De Schepper et al. show that perivascular SPP1 induces microglia-mediated synapse engulfment, highlighting a neuroimmune interaction that contributes to synapse loss in amyloid pathology.
Microglia mediate aberrant synapse engulfment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Here the authors show a perivascular cells-to-microglia crosstalk that induces microglia phagocytic state resulting in synapse engulfment in two mouse models of AD.
The authors map thalamic synapses onto layer 2/3 mouse visual cortex neurons, showing they are sparse, small and heterogeneously distributed. Modeling these data suggests that a few neurons could together reliably decode thalamic visual input.
Understanding the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying pathology can shed light on its mechanisms. Here the authors introduce STARmap PLUS, a method that combines high-resolution spatial transcriptomics with protein detection.
Zhou et al. show that the generation and maintenance of chronic neuropathic pain after peripheral nerve injury is crucially dependent on the activation of a parabrachial nucleus–nucleus basalis-S1 pathway during non-REM sleep.
Pathological α-synuclein (α-Syn) spreading is critical for the progression of many neurodegenerative diseases. The authors demonstrate that soluble α-Syn post-translational modifications (PTMs) dramatically modulate pathological α-synuclein spreading.
This study shows that pyramidal tract (PT) and intratelencephalic (IT) projection neurons process information via distinct parallel subnetworks across cortex, each preferentially associated with either motor events or sensorimotor transformation.
Distinct cortical pyramidal neuron types, defined by developmental lineage, make unique contributions to behavioral decisions. We highlight the importance of interactions among diverse cortical and subcortical areas for successful decision outcomes.
In this Review, Villeda and colleagues describe blood-to-brain communication from a systems physiology perspective, with an emphasis on blood-derived signals as potent drivers of both age-related brain dysfunction and brain rejuvenation.
The authors established a method to map RNA localization sequences (zipcodes) and identified the let-7 site and AU repeat as new zipcodes in primary cortical neurons.
The authors show that action value modulates motivation to perform a decision-making task more strongly in females than in males. Anterior cingulate cortex neurons that project to the striatum contribute to this sex difference.
A computational model predicts coordinated drift of neural receptive fields during noisy representation learning and recapitulates experimental observations in the posterior parietal cortex and hippocampal CA1.
Activity in a neural population arises from both its inputs and its recurrent connections. Here the authors show that analyzing the dynamics of trial-to-trial variability in activity can offer insights into delineating these contributions.
van Lengerich et al. developed a human TREM2 antibody with a transport vehicle (ATV) that improves brain exposure and biodistribution in mouse models. ATV:TREM2 promotes microglial energetic capacity and metabolism via mitochondrial pathways.
