Volume 22 Issue 9, September 2019

A new study sheds light on how sensitivity to communication sounds is established in the brain. Juvenile finches raised with tutors of either the same or different species always learned the tutors’ songs. Cortical neurons developed selectivity for the learned song by tuning for its secondary acoustic features.

A nucleotide repeat expansion in the C9orf72 gene is the most common cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The mutation causes production of aberrant proteins by an enigmatic form of translation. Yamada et al. identify that RPS25 is required for this form of translation.

Tost et al. show that urban green space exposure improves well-being, particularly in people dwelling in relatively deprived areas and showing less prefrontal activity during emotion processing, a neural signature that is linked to mental health risk.

This study identifies eight significant genetic associations with intrusive reexperiencing of trauma in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Million Veteran Program (MVP), a large biobank focused on US veterans.

Breen et al. map RNA editing profiles in cortical samples from individuals with schizophrenia and controls, and find links between altered RNA editing in glutamatergic and postsynaptic density genes and schizophrenia genetic risk architecture.

Researchers identify a transcriptional network engaged in stress-resilient mice that is regulated by a previously unstudied transcription factor, Zfp189, and elucidate molecular mechanisms controlling this network and resilience behavior.

Gehrlach et al. show how the posterior insular cortex processes and modulates diverse internally and externally generated aversive states, and they dissect the functional contribution of segregated projections mediating inhibition of ongoing behaviors.

Laboy-Juárez et al. show that barrel cortex neurons in mice are tuned for elementary multi-whisker sequences that represent tactile motion, using a computation similar to motion direction selectivity in vision. These findings provide a novel view of columnar organization.

Given a choice between food and water outcomes on a T-maze, rats preferred the outcome they did not have access to overnight, yet the content of awake hippocampal replay was consistently shifted away from the preferred outcome.

Green et al. find that, when their internal heading estimate is rotated via neural stimulation, flies turn their body in a direction that aims to return their heading estimate back to its previous value. This suggests the heading estimate is compared with an internal goal to guide navigation.

Like humans, songbirds learn to communicate vocally early in life. Moore and Woolley taught birds the songs of a different species to identify how vocal experience and auditory tuning mechanisms create neural representations of communication sounds.

Detecting and responding to noxious stimuli is essential for survival. Wee et al. show that noxious stimuli elicit intense and widespread activity in zebrafish oxytocin neurons, which promote defensive behavior by activating hindbrain premotor neurons.

Using data from rats and humans, the authors study the time it takes to make sensory judgments. The authors define the new regularity as the time–intensity equivalence in discrimination (TIED), which provides a mechanistic basis of Weber’s law.

Everyday decisions require choosing among multiple options. This work derives the optimal decision policy and shows how it can be approximated by a biologically plausible neural circuit and how this circuit can reproduce observed behavior.

Neural populations often encode unknown variables. Chaudhuri et al. develop a method to decode unknown variables by finding shapes in neural data. They show that a mammalian brain circuit of thousands of neurons constructs a navigational compass with only a one-dimensional ring of stable activity states.

The authors leverage extensive RNA sequencing data from postmortem brains of controls and individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to identify altered patterns of allele specific gene expression.