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Most of the cerebral microcirculation is comprised of capillaries that are lined with pericytes, but the influence of pericytes on local blood flow was not previously established. A new study by Hartmann and colleagues uses selective optical ablation or activation to demonstrate that capillary pericytes exert both static and slow types of regulation on capillary diameter to affect flow, which are distinct from canonical rapid regulation by arteriole smooth muscle.
The act of remembering information or planning actions in short term memory can often be robust to distracting or conflicting information. Finkelstein et al. reveal the neural computations behind this robustness against distractors using a combination of optogenetics, behavior, neural recordings and neural network modelling.
In new research, Smith et al. identify thousands of novel genetic associations with human brain structure and function, including those on the X chromosome, by analyzing ~4,000 MRI-derived traits measured in almost 40,000 individuals from the UK Biobank resource.
Disrupting reconsolidation of the maladaptive memories underlying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be transformative for treatment. However, patients cannot undergo the direct re-exposure to trauma-cues used to induce reconsolidation in animal studies. Ressler and colleagues report ‘covert’ memory reactivation in rats, bolstering hopes for translation of reconsolidation-based interventions.
Dong and colleagues investigated mechanisms mediating neurodegeneration in multiple sclerosis and identified a direct role for oxidized phosphatidylcholines (OxPCs) in driving CNS cell death. Microglia activity, mediated by the lipid sensor TREM2 and a neutralizing OxPC antibody, were capable of rescuing OxPC-induced neurotoxicity.
How does the intricate balance of gene regulation and expression within individual neurons relate to electrophysiological oscillations and, ultimately, cognition? In a new study, Berto and colleagues take an important step toward addressing this question by correlating oscillatory biomarkers of successful memory encoding with gene expression on a within-participant basis.
Persistent negative emotional states, such as anxiety, suppress social behavior and vice versa. A new report identifies a novel neural circuit that generates persistent anxiety states and describes how competing excitatory and inhibitory components of this circuit battle to pattern social behavior.
By probing the dependence on learning history or motivational significance of stimuli, Sharpe and colleagues reveal previously uncharacterized contributions of lateral hypothalamus GABA neurons to associative learning.
A new study discovered that ventral pallidal neurons projecting back to the nucleus accumbens promote consumption. The findings call into question the accepted direction of information flow through the ventral basal ganglia and open new avenues for studying how consumption is regulated in proportion to subjective value.
Fibrotic scarring after inflammation is well-characterized in peripheral tissues, but its role in the CNS is less clear. A new study shows that local proliferation of CNS fibroblasts drives fibrotic scar formation in response to circulating inflammatory cell infiltration in a model of multiple sclerosis, which may limit repair.
