Articles in 2019

Two studies show that, compared with microglia in anaesthetized mice, microglia in awake mice show reduced surveillance owing to an increase in noradrenaline signalling.

Dendritic activation and action potentials lead to the expression of distinct heterodimers of the inducible transcription factor NPAS4, which show distinct DNA binding patterns; these patterns were recapitulated on exposure of mice to a novel environment.

The complex spatiotemporal organization and regulation of sleep-related brain activity has been appreciated only in the past decade. Here, Adamantidis and colleagues review neurobiological mechanisms underlying local and large-scale neuronal network oscillations in the sleeping mammalian brain and how they relate to the global architecture of sleep.

A population of hypothalamic neurons that are active during REM sleep are involved in forgetting.

RNA-binding proteins regulate the use of mRNA during periods of stress, in part through the formation of transient membraneless organelles known as stress granules. In this Review, Wolozin and Ivanov examine the biology of such granules in neurons and their potential roles in a number of neurodegenerative diseases.

Rodent models are essential for characterizing the mechanisms underlying depression as well as for the development of fast-acting and innovative antidepressants. Here, Anand Gururajan and colleagues review strategies for inducing depressive-like behaviours and endophenotypes, and discuss how genetic and circuit-dissection techniques might be used to refine existing models and generate new ones.

Three studies show that synaptic interactions between neurons and glioma cells or cells of breast-cancer-to-brain metastases may promote tumour growth.

Dopamine signals are implicated in not only reporting reward prediction errors but also various probabilistic computations. In this Opinion article, Gershman and Uchida propose that these different roles for dopamine can be placed within a common reinforcement learning framework.

An innovative technique shows that mitochondria of different cell types in the CNS show differences in protein expression.

Detailed transcriptomic analysis of cells within the cortical layers of the human medium temporal gyrus revealed surprising homology with existing mouse transcriptomic data — but also some important differences.

Astrocytes in the spinal cord and brain are involved in the regulation of physiological and pathological pain signalling. Ji and colleagues here describe the cellular and molecular mechanisms through which astrocytes contribute to the induction and maintenance of chronic pain and itch.

In mice, CREB–Zfp189 interactions in the prefrontal cortex drive a transcriptional network that increases resilience to chronic social defeat stress.

The brain’s default network is thought to comprise a set of regions in the association cortex. Randy Buckner and Lauren DiNicola review findings from humans, monkeys and rodents indicating that multiple subnetworks make up the default network and explore the implications of these observations.