Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Behavior is more than the motor outputs that we can directly measure. Here Calhoun and colleagues devise a novel method for inferring the internal states that affect how fruit flies process sensory information during courtship, providing a new framework for understanding the neural encoding of behavior.
Reitich-Stolero and Paz examined multineuron correlates of Pavlovian learning in the primate amygdala. They found repeating patterns of activity across neurons that may mediate synaptic-level plasticity mechanisms. This extends the notion of replay, often examined relative to navigation in the hippocampus, to aversive learning in the amygdala.
Using samples from the Danish Neonatal Screening Biobank, children with ASD and children with ADHD were found to have similar, significantly increased rates of rare protein-truncating variants in evolutionarily constrained genes.
Animals compose behaviors from both sensory cues and internal states. Calhoun et al. develop an unsupervised modeling framework to identify the dynamic internal states that shape social interactions in Drosophila and use the model to identify neurons that modulate the male’s internal state.
This study shows that mouse prefrontal neurons differentially categorize social and nonsocial olfactory cues. Social cue representations are refined with experience and are disrupted in a mouse model of autism with elevated cortical noise.
The authors show that spatiotemporal spike sequences across neurons in the primate amygdala serve as a coding mechanism and might aid memory formation via the rehearsal of a recently experienced aversive or pleasant tone–odor association.
DNA sequencing of 3,864 individuals with ALS and 7,839 controls identified a novel disease gene, DNAJC7, which encodes a heat-shock protein. As DNAJC7 is an essential part of cell maintenance, mutations in DNAJC7 may lead to neurodegeneration.
Grubman et al. generated a single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the entorhinal cortex from patients with Alzheimer’s disease and identified transcription factor networks predicted to control disease progression in a cell-subtype-specific way.
This paper offers a primer on transcriptional enhancers in the CNS, using examples of enhancer regulation in the maturing brain and the role of non-coding variation in brain disorders to explain the concepts emerging from functional neurogenomics.
Sankowski et al. have combined high-throughput techniques to characterize human microglia, identifying a spectrum of microglia phenotypes that are determined by localization, aging and glioblastoma.
Walking requires continual integrated information about the dynamic internal and external environment. This study reveals a pathway whereby the somatosensory cortex directly influences motor behavior based on integrated spatiotemporal information.
Malignant gliomas recapitulate steps in neurodevelopment to form organ-like structures. Jung et al. review how neuroscience can provide novel insights into glioma biology, and how these insights might be used for future therapeutic approaches.
Zhou et al. show that the reward and context information of cocaine-associated memory is stored in selectively strengthened inter-engram connections from the ventral CA1 to the nucleus accumbens core, forming an ‘engram circuit’ that mediates memory recall.
Hartley et al. report the bidirectional remodeling of a basolateral amygdala-to-central amygdala neural circuit, where input onto corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF)-expressing and CRF-negative neurons is shaped by the acquisition and extinction of fear memory.
Qasim et al. describe neurons in the human entorhinal cortex that activate near the locations in space that a person is cued to recall during a memory task. These results show one way in which the cognitive map shifts according to memory demands.
The authors develop a deep learning approach that enables an efficient search of the input space to find the best stimuli for modeled neurons. When tested, these stimuli are most effective at driving their matching cells in the brain.
Forkosh, Karamihalev and colleagues present a framework for inferring stable traits from a broad range of behavioral readouts and apply it to capture biologically relevant individual differences in mice.
Findling, Skvortsova et al. find that a large fraction of non-greedy decisions that humans make in volatile environments do not stem from exploration but from the limited precision of learning, and further identify its neurophysiological correlates.
The Drosophila neuropeptide leucokinin mediates hunger- and thirst-dependent expression of learned behaviors. State-relevant selection of appropriate memory emerges from competition between leucokinin and other modulators onto dopaminergic neurons.