Articles in 2012

The authors studied how neurons in three frontal cortical areas encode the outcomes of social decisions as monkeys performed a social reward allocation task. Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) neurons signaled received rewards, anterior cingulate (ACCs) neurons signaled forgone rewards, and the ACCg emerged as a key nexus for the computation of shared experience and social reward.

Dorsal root ganglion neurons respond to both painful and itchy stimuli, but whether itch-specific neurons exist was, up until now, unknown. Here the authors describe a group of MrgprA3-expressing neurons that innervate the superficial layers of the skin and selectively sense itch.

Nature Neuroscience introduces a methods reporting checklist.

The ability to filter out distracting sensory information is crucial to adaptive behavior. A primate study finds that prefrontal cortex is more important than parietal cortex in that function.

A report elucidates the widely recognized, but poorly understood, concept of gene-environment interaction, finding a molecular mechanism in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder: demethylation of a glucocorticoid response element in the stress response regulator FKBP5 that depends on both the risk allele and childhood trauma.

In a case of sex-linked epigenetic inheritance, paternal cocaine use results in a heritable increase in cortical Bdnf gene expression that confers a cocaine-resistant phenotype in male, but not female, progeny.

Two new studies provide experimental evidence of how ancient genomic duplications of synaptic genes provided the substrate for diversification that ultimately expanded vertebrate cognitive complexity.

The authors use patch clamp recordings and computer simulations to determine the number of molecules of glutamate released at two central synapses. They find that the amount of glutamate released maximizes the synaptic current per glutamate molecule and maximizes the signal's information content, suggesting that synapses operate under conditions that optimize resources.

In this study, the authors show that self-administration of cocaine by males resulted in an increase in BDNF expression in the mPFC and reduced drug-seeking behavior by their male offspring. This change in BDNF expression was associated with an increase in acetylated histone H3 at the Bdnf promoter IV.

The authors utilize optical occlusion of penetrating blood vessels to induce cortical microinfarcts. Occlusion of even a single such vessel leads to behavioral dysfunction, whereas multiple, yet sparse, occlusions can induce substantial tissue damage. Excitotoxicity blockers ameliorate both effects.

Here the authors show that the suppression of salient, but task-irrelevant, distractors is much stronger in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) than in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP). Their results suggest that, although both areas can contribute to perceptual selection, the dlPFC has a decisive influence on whether a salient stimulus influences actions.

GABAergic neurogliaform cells are thought to use volume transmission and provide widespread cortical inhibition, indiscriminately. To their surprise, Chittajallu et al. found that that neurogliaform cells exert a spatially restricted inhibitory influence on the mouse canonical thalamocortical circuit, as they selectively suppress feed-forward inhibition while sparing feed-forward excitation.

The authors show that nerve injury induces expression of NRG1 type I in Schwann cells and that this expression is necessary for efficient remyelination. In addition, axonally expressed NRG1 type III can negatively regulate the expression of NRG1 type I in Schwann cells.

This study examines the neural coding of decision confidence when human subjects make value-based economic choices, and finds that signals of explicit confidence are encoded in the activity of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and its interaction with the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex.

Midbrain dopaminergic neurons show phasic elevations of firing in response to reward-predicting stimuli during learning. Here the authors provide data from in vivo recordings and optogenetic stimulation to support a role for monosynaptic inhibition of dopamine neurons from projection neurons in the substantia nigra in extinction of learned behaviors.

Gene-environment interactions of FKBP5 and early trauma predict adult stress-related psychiatric disorders. In this study, the authors reveal the molecular mechanism of how transcriptionally active variants interact with early trauma leading to long-term allele-specific changes in DNA methylation in glucocorticoid response elements of FKBP5.

The authors examined the differential roles of GluN2A and GluN2B in modulating synaptic plasticity and behavior. This study provides insight into how gene duplication events during evolution can produce new functional consequences.

In this paper, the authors show that mice lacking Dlg genes each show distinct deficits in various learning paradigms. In addition, they find that humans with DLG2 mutations show similar cognitive deficits to their murine counterparts, suggesting an evolutionary conservation of function.

A report in this issue of Nature Neuroscience demonstrates that stress in infancy leading to altered cortisol levels in childhood culminates in vulnerability to dysregulated affect in adolescent girls by biasing the functional dynamics of core neural regions mediating the generation and regulation of emotional responsiveness.

Using a new retrovirus-optogenetics technique, researchers have found that new neurons in the adult hippocampus are important for memory, but only at an immature stage, when they show enhanced synaptic plasticity.