Articles in 2016

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  • Emotional arousal is known to produce long-lasting memories for emotional experiences. Here the authors find that brain states associated with emotional arousal can persist tens of minutes later, biasing and enhancing how new, unrelated information is encoded into memory and later remembered.

    • Arielle Tambini
    • Ulrike Rimmele
    • Lila Davachi
    Article
  • The authors show that, unlike the consolidation and refinement of excitatory connections observed during sensory map formation, a dramatic broadening of patterned activation domains, connectivity, and tuning occurs in interneurons in the olfactory bulb. This developmental expansion is sensitive to activity manipulations and may reveal general principles of interneuron network development.

    • Kathleen B Quast
    • Kevin Ung
    • Benjamin R Arenkiel
    Article
  • The authors show that pregnancy involves substantial and consistent structural changes in the human brain, primarily located in regions subserving social cognition. These changes overlap with areas that respond to the mothers' babies and predict measures of postpartum maternal attachment. Moreover, they endure for at least 2 years after pregnancy.

    • Elseline Hoekzema
    • Erika Barba-Müller
    • Oscar Vilarroya
    Article
  • The hypothalamus is a brain region rich in functionally segregated neurons. Here Romanov and colleagues use single-cell RNA sequencing to distinguish 62 neuronal subtypes and define their neuropeptide and neurotransmitter makeup. They then show that onecut-3-containing dopamine neurons populate the periventricular area and are wired into the circadian circuitry.

    • Roman A Romanov
    • Amit Zeisel
    • Tibor Harkany
    Article
  • Body fluid conditions are continuously monitored in the brain in order to regulate thirst and salt appetites. Through a combination of optogenetics and electrophysiology, the authors reveal distinct neural mechanisms in the subfornical organ for generating appropriate water- and salt-intake behaviors according to body fluid conditions.

    • Takashi Matsuda
    • Takeshi Y Hiyama
    • Masaharu Noda
    Article
  • How the hippocampus and sensory cortical regions interact during memory consolidation is largely unknown. The authors identify a rapid loop of information flow from auditory cortex to the hippocampus and back, around the times of hippocampal sharp wave ripples, which coordinates memory reactivation during sleep across these brain areas.

    • Gideon Rothschild
    • Elad Eban
    • Loren M Frank
    Article
  • Cognitive tasks require storing and manipulating information for short periods of time. Verbal working memory involves storing and manipulating speech information, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain unknown. The authors identify storage systems for sensory and motor representations and two distinct manipulation systems, demonstrating that multiple subsystems comprise verbal working memory.

    • Gregory B Cogan
    • Asha Iyer
    • Bijan Pesaran
    Article
  • The authors show that a normative approach to olfaction, Bayesian inference, reproduces much of the anatomy, physiology and behavior seen in real organisms. The model provides insight into how the olfactory system demixes odors, and, by extension, how other sensory systems extract relevant information from activity in peripheral organs.

    • Agnieszka Grabska-Barwińska
    • Simon Barthelmé
    • Peter E Latham
    Article
  • The authors demonstrate that activity patterns in the default network during unguided spoken recollection of real-world events were similar between individuals recalling the same specific events. Patterns were altered between perception and recall in a systematic manner across brains. These results reveal a common spatial organization for memory representations.

    • Janice Chen
    • Yuan Chang Leong
    • Uri Hasson
    Article
  • Auditory hair cells contain mechanotransduction channels that are activated by sound. The authors show that Piezo2, a mechanotransduction channel important for touch perception, is expressed in auditory hair cells. Surprisingly, Piezo2 is not the mechanotransduction channel essential for auditory perception and is instead observed after damage to hair cells.

    • Zizhen Wu
    • Nicolas Grillet
    • Ulrich Müller
    Article
  • Hunger-promoting AgRP neurons and satiety-promoting POMC neurons in the arcuate nucleus mediate homeostatic regulation of hunger. Yet a rapidly acting satiety component analogous to rapidly hunger-promoting AgRP neurons has been missing. The authors identify this missing satiety signal and show that it is carried by a novel subset of arcuate glutamatergic neurons.

    • Henning Fenselau
    • John N Campbell
    • Bradford B Lowell
    Article
  • The authors show that a direct pathway from the dorsal hippocampus to the prelimbic cortex is necessary for contextual fear memory strengthening. Molecular analyses and functional targeting revealed that prelimbic excitatory and inhibitory synapses have a critical role in promoting memory strengthening, while inhibiting extinction.

    • Xiaojing Ye
    • Dana Kapeller-Libermann
    • Cristina M Alberini
    Article
  • The strength of aversive learning is proportional to the intensity of aversive experiences, but how brain circuits set memory strength during learning is not known. The authors show that an amygdala-to-midbrain feedback circuit conveying information about future unpleasant experiences inhibits aversive processing during learning to calibrate memory strength.

    • Takaaki Ozawa
    • Edgar A Ycu
    • Joshua P Johansen
    Article
  • Experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis can be induced by strong activation of innate immunity. This subtype of EAE is resistant to interferon (IFN)-β treatment and is NLRP3 inflammasome independent. Its development is dependent upon lymphotoxin-β receptor LTβR and CXCR2, and can be inhibited by blocking these receptors. The IFNβ-resistant EAE subtype is characterized by minimal remission and neuronal damage induced by semaphorin-6B on CD4+ T cells.

    • Makoto Inoue
    • Po-han Chen
    • Mari L Shinohara
    Article
  • Animals have a remarkable ability to adjust their behavioral response to the same stimulus based on the immediate behavioral context. The authors show that the nucleus basalis broadcasts a contextual signal to the auditory cortex that is then translated by inhibitory networks to regulate excitatory neuronal output and behavior.

    • Kishore V Kuchibhotla
    • Jonathan V Gill
    • Robert C Froemke
    Article
  • The activity of cortical neurons is extremely noisy. This study builds a mathematical theory linking the spatial scales of cortical wiring to how noise is generated and distributed over a population of neurons. Predictions from the theory are validated using population recordings in primate visual area V1.

    • Robert Rosenbaum
    • Matthew A Smith
    • Brent Doiron
    Article
  • Self-movement estimation is critical to motor control and navigation; however, the neural circuits that accurately track body motion are poorly understood. This study shows that Drosophila optic-flow-processing neurons receive three distinct locomotor-related signals that are used to encode a quantitative estimate of the fly's walking movements, even in the absence of visual stimuli.

    • Terufumi Fujiwara
    • Tomás L Cruz
    • M Eugenia Chiappe
    Article
  • Previous work on mammalian motor cortex has focused on the role of this region in movement generation. Here the authors demonstrate that activity of vibrissa motor cortex neurons decreases during various forms of vibrissal touch, suggesting that a primary function of vibrissa motor cortex is to suppress whisking behavior.

    • Christian Laut Ebbesen
    • Guy Doron
    • Michael Brecht
    Article
  • In this paper, the authors show that dishonesty gradually increases with repetition. This escalation is supported by a reduction in response to self-serving dishonesty over time in the amygdala.

    • Neil Garrett
    • Stephanie C Lazzaro
    • Tali Sharot
    Article