Articles in 2013

Corticostriatal neuronal activity in the auditory cortex is necessary to drive behavioural choices in an auditory discrimination task.

Research in multisensory processing has exploded in recent years, but different experimental and theoretical approaches have yielded conflicting or seemingly unrelated results. In this Review, Fetschet al. present a body of work that attempts to integrate and accommodate these findings.

The subunit composition of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) determines their biophysical, pharmacological and signalling properties. Paolettiet al.examine the contribution of individual receptor subtypes to normal physiology and disease, and the potential benefits of targeting specific NMDAR subtypes to counteract the deleterious effects of deregulated glutamatergic transmission.

The gene encoding trace amine-associated receptor 4 (TAAR4) is essential for the detection of aversive odours in mice, demonstrating the importance of an individual receptor gene for odour perception.

Exposure to different day–night cycles leads to a change in the expression of neurotransmitters and behaviour in adult rats.

Synaptic dysfunction is a key pathophysiological hallmark in several neurodegenerative disorders. In this Review, Lu and colleagues consider a 'synaptic repair'-based therapy for neurodegenerative diseases that targets pathophysiology rather than pathogenesis and discuss BDNF as a potential synaptic repair molecule.

Rats may use sequences of activity in hippocampal place cells to plan a route to a remembered location.

Circadian corticosterone fluctuations support learning and memory by promoting learning-associated spine formation and elimination.

A new study shows that a subtype of dorsal root ganglion sensory neurons that express calcitonin gene-related peptide-α are involved in sensing heat but also indirectly modulate cold-sensing neurons.

Stress induces a metaplastic signal at GABA synapses in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus that can account for both the early sensitization and the delayed inhibition of responses to subsequent stressors.

Contexts provide information that is central to understanding the meaning of events. Maren and colleagues describe the neural systems that underlie context processing and consider how deficits in these systems may be involved in several psychiatric conditions.

Sleep is characterized by globally synchronized neuronal activity. Vyazovskiy and Harris propose that the synchronous 'down states' of neuronal populations during sleep enable neurons to perform prophylactic maintenance in the absence of synaptic inputs and spiking activity, and hypothesize that this is a key function of sleep.

In the primary visual cortex in mice, stimulus feature-selective neocortical microcircuits exist before eye opening, but preferential local connectivity between neurons responding to similar stimulus features does not develop until the onset of vision.