Volume 22 Issue 12, December 2019

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.

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.

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.

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.

In offspring exposed to THC in utero, molecular, synaptic and circuit reorganizations lead to a hyperdopaminergic phenotype and behavioral susceptibility. The neurosteroid pregnenolone restores both dopamine function and abnormal behavior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human stem cell-derived microglia integrate into mouse brain, displaying transcriptome signatures of microglia directly isolated from human brain and providing a chimeric model to study human-specific aspects of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain diseases.