Development of the nervous system articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    The central amygdala relies on inhibitory circuitry to encode fear memories, but how this information is acquired and expressed in these connections is unknown. Two new papers use a combination of cutting-edge technologies to reveal two distinct microcircuits within the central amygdala, one required for fear acquisition and the other critical for conditioned fear responses. Understanding this architecture provides a strong link between activity in a specific circuit and particular behavioural consequences.

    • Wulf Haubensak
    • , Prabhat S. Kunwar
    •  & David J. Anderson

  • News & Views |

    How do we tell red from green? Work on the primate retina shows how neural circuitry combines signals from individual cone photoreceptor cells to provide the basic building blocks for colour vision. See Article p.673

    • Jonathan B. Demb
    •  & David H. Brainard

  • News |

    Repetitive neural responses may enhance recall of faces and words.

    • Janelle Weaver

  • News & Views |

    Neurons generate their output signal — the action potential — in a distinct region of the axon called the initial segment. The location and extent of this trigger zone can be modified by neural activity to control excitability.

    • Jan Gründemann
    •  & Michael Häusser

  • Letter |

    To build a representation of the auditory world, neuronal circuits in neonatal rodents exhibit plasticity, allowing sensitivity to the pattern of sensory inputs. At this time, neurons construct a receptive field, which relies on a balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. Here, excitation and inhibition were found to be co-tuned upon hearing onset, but later an adjustment in the excitatory input strength occurred. Thus a fine adjustment in synaptic inputs, rather than more radical changes such as input pruning, may refine mature receptive fields.

    • Yujiao J. Sun
    • , Guangying K. Wu
    •  & Li I. Zhang

  • Letter |

    To build a representation of the auditory world, neuronal circuits in neonatal rodents exhibit plasticity, allowing sensitivity to the pattern of sensory inputs. At this time, neurons construct a receptive field, which relies on a balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. Here, excitation and inhibition were found to be co-tuned upon hearing onset, but an experience-dependent refinement of inhibition later occurred. Thus a fine adjustment in synaptic inputs, rather than more radical changes such as input pruning, may refine mature receptive fields.

    • Anja L. Dorrn
    • , Kexin Yuan
    •  & Robert C. Froemke

  • News & Views |

    Analysis of a selected class of neuron in the brains of live animals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) opens the door to mapping genetically specified neural circuits.

    • David A. Leopold

  • Letter |

    Proper functioning of the brain requires a balance between the formation of excitatory and inhibitory synapses, but how this is achieved during development is unclear. Here FGF22 and FGF7, two fibroblast growth factor cell–cell signalling molecules, are shown to promote the formation of excitatory and inhibitory synapses, respectively, through their effect on epilepsy in mice. These findings should inform other neurological and psychiatric disorders involving defects in synapse formation.

    • Akiko Terauchi
    • , Erin M. Johnson-Venkatesh
    •  & Hisashi Umemori

  • News & Views |

    The neocortex of the mammalian brain mediates functions such as sensory perception and ultimately consciousness and language. The spread of local signals across large distances in this brain region has now been clarified.

    • Dirk Feldmeyer

  • News & Views |

    A neuron can receive thousands of inputs that, together, tell it when to fire. New techniques can image the activity of many inputs, and shed light on how single neurons perform computations in response.

    • Nicholas J. Priebe
    •  & David Ferster

  • Article |

    Many sensory neurons in the mammalian cortex are tuned to specific stimulus features — for example, some fire only when horizontal bars move from top to bottom in the visual field. But it has been unclear whether such tuning is encoded in a neuron's inputs, or whether the neuron itself computes its response. Here, a new technique for visualizing and mapping sensory inputs to the dendrites of neurons in the mouse visual cortex has shown that each neuron makes its own 'decision' as to the orientation preference of its output.

    • Hongbo Jia
    • , Nathalie L. Rochefort
    •  & Arthur Konnerth

  • Letter |

    Although several synaptic adhesion proteins have been identified as genetic risk factors in schizophrenia, it is unclear as to what role they play in disease progression. Here, it is shown that two such proteins — neuregulin 1 and its receptor ErbB4 — function to regulate the connectivity of specific cortical circuits. The study not only implicates these proteins in the wiring of inhibitory synapses, about which little is known, but also provides a new perspective on their involvement in schizophrenia.

    • Pietro Fazzari
    • , Ana V. Paternain
    •  & Beatriz Rico

  • Article |

    In the mammalian brain, the subventricular zone (SVZ) produces neural progenitor cells that migrate into the cortex to populate the upper layers. In humans this region is massively expanded, producing an outer SVZ (OSVZ). Here, live-cell imaging of developing human tissue was used to show that the OSVZ has similar characteristics to the SVZ, with progenitor cells proliferating in a way that depends on the Notch protein. The findings have implications for our understanding of how the complex human brain evolved.

    • David V. Hansen
    • , Jan H. Lui
    •  & Arnold R. Kriegstein

  • Article |

    Benzodiazepines, such as valium, are used both in clinics and for recreational purposes, but lead to addiction in some individuals. Addictive drugs increase the levels of dopamine and trigger synaptic adaptations in the mesolimbic reward system, but the neural basis for the addictive nature of benzodiazepines remains elusive. Here, they are shown to increase firing of dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area through GABAA receptor activation in nearby interneurons.

    • Kelly R. Tan
    • , Matthew Brown
    •  & Christian Lüscher

  • Article |

    Mouse and human fibroblasts can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state with a combination of four transcription factors. Here, mature differentiated cells are directed, via a combination of a few transcription factors (distinct from those described for generating iPS cells), to form functional neurons in vitro, without having to revert the fibroblasts to an embryonic state.

    • Thomas Vierbuchen
    • , Austin Ostermeier
    •  & Marius Wernig

  • Letter |

    Rodents have an orientation map of their surroundings, produced and updated by a network of neurons in the entorhinal cortex known as 'grid cells'. However, it is currently unknown whether humans encode their location in a similar manner. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, a macroscopic signal representing a subject's position in a virtual reality environment is now detected that meets the criteria for defining grid-cell encoding.

    • Christian F. Doeller
    • , Caswell Barry
    •  & Neil Burgess

  • Letter |

    If the activity of genetically specified neurons is silenced in a temporally precise fashion, the roles of different cell classes in neural processes can be studied. Members of the class of light-driven outward proton pumps are now shown to mediate powerful, safe, multiple-colour silencing of neural activity. The gene archaerhodopsin-3 (Arch) enables near 100% silencing of neurons in the awake brain when virally expressed in the mouse cortex and illuminated with yellow light.

    • Brian Y. Chow
    • , Xue Han
    •  & Edward S. Boyden

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