Neural circuits articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is not entirely understood how network plasticity produces the coding of predicted value during stimulus-outcome learning. Here, the authors reveal a reinforcing loop in distributed limbic circuits, transforming sensory stimuli into reward prediction coding broadcasted by dopamine neurons to the brain.

    • Lars-Lennart Oettl
    • , Max Scheller
    •  & Wolfgang Kelsch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Li et al. analyzed structural connectivity of deep brain stimulation electrodes in 50 patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder operated at four centers. Connectivity to a specific tract within the anterior limb of the internal capsule was associated with optimal treatment response across cohorts, surgeons and centers.

    • Ningfei Li
    • , Juan Carlos Baldermann
    •  & Andreas Horn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The thalamus provides sensory input to the cortex, but many aspects of thalamocortical signaling remain unknown. Here, the authors reveal parallel non-overlapping thalamic pathways with distinct representations of tactile and decision-related information during a goal-directed sensorimotor task.

    • Sami El-Boustani
    • , B. Semihcan Sermet
    •  & Carl C. H. Petersen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in EEG delta-activity are widely used as proxy of sleep propensity. Here the authors demonstrate in mice and humans the presence of two types of delta-waves, only one of which reports on prior sleep-wake history with dynamics denoting a wake-inertia process accompanying deepest non-rapid-eye-movement sleep (NREM) sleep.

    • Jeffrey Hubbard
    • , Thomas C. Gent
    •  & Paul Franken

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Keinath et al. show that information about the recent past is represented in the hippocampus through changes in firing rates in the absence of task demands. This representation is eliminated when DG–CA3 circuitry is inhibited.

    • Alexandra T. Keinath
    • , Andrés Nieto-Posadas
    •  & Mark P. Brandon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) encodes expected outcomes and plays a key role in outcome-guided behavior. The authors show here that the top-down projection from the OFC to the visual cortex drives visual associative learning by modulating the response gain of V1 neurons to non-relevant stimuli.

    • Dechen Liu
    • , Juan Deng
    •  & Haishan Yao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dorsal raphe 5HT(DRSert) neurons regulate arousal from hypercapnia by their projections to the neurons in the external lateral parabrachial nucleus (PBel) that are glutamatergic and also express calcitonin gene related peptide (PBelCGRP). The DRSert input to the PBel modulates the arousal system to rising levels of blood CO2, and may be mediated by 5HT2a receptors on the PBelCGRP neurons.

    • Satvinder Kaur
    • , Roberto De Luca
    •  & Clifford B. Saper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Thalamic head direction (HD) cells are necessary to establish spatial maps in the hippocampus. Here, the authors show that HD cells tuned to a particular direction are coupled to individual hippocampal ripple events during sleep, suggesting an influence of the replay of specific trajectories during sleep memory consolidation.

    • Guillaume Viejo
    •  & Adrien Peyrache

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Self-grooming is a frequently observed repetitive behaviour in rodents that is believed to contribute to post-stress de-arousal. The authors identified a previously unknown limbic circuit that includes the ventral lateral septum in rats and is involved in regulating stress-induced self-grooming.

    • Ming-Dao Mu
    • , Hong-Yan Geng
    •  & Ya Ke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Theta oscillations have been implicated in hippocampal processing but mechanisms constraining phase timing of specific cell types are unknown. Here, the authors combine single-cell and multisite recordings with evolutionary computational models to evaluate mechanisms of phase preference of deep and superficial CA1 pyramidal cells.

    • Andrea Navas-Olive
    • , Manuel Valero
    •  & Liset M. de la Prida

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The trans-synaptic interaction of the cell-adhesion molecules teneurins (TENs) with latrophilins (LPHNs) promotes excitatory synapse formation. Here authors report the high resolution cryo-EM structure of the TEN2-LPHN3 complex, describe the trimeric TEN2-LPHN3-FLRT3 complex and show how alternative-splicing regulates the TEN2-LPHN3 interaction.

    • Jingxian Li
    • , Yuan Xie
    •  & Demet Araç

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neurons compute by integrating synaptic inputs across their dendritic arbor. Here, the authors show that distinct cell-types of mouse retinal ganglion cells that receive similar excitatory inputs have different biophysical mechanisms of input integration to generate their unique response tuning.

    • Yanli Ran
    • , Ziwei Huang
    •  & Thomas Euler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Authors develop an integrated wireless system to examine brain states in freely-moving monkeys. They show that neural population activity in prefrontal cortex covaries with natural behavioral dynamics. Active behavior is associated with elevated arousal and increases in spiking activity while reducing low-frequency synchrony within cortical populations.

    • Russell Milton
    • , Neda Shahidi
    •  & Valentin Dragoi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The oxytocin receptor plays an important role in establishing mature neural circuits for social behavior during the early postnatal period. Here, the authors develop digital reference brains for different postnatal ages and provide a quantitative brain-wide map of oxytocin receptor expression in early postnatal and adult mouse brains.

    • Kyra T. Newmaster
    • , Zachary T. Nolan
    •  & Yongsoo Kim

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The visual callosal pathway reciprocally connects mammalian visual cortices and is proposed to facilitate activation of binocular neurons. Here, the authors show that this pathway facilitates responses in both monocular and binocular neurons but these responses are gated by the ipsilateral lateral geniculate nucleus.

    • Vishnudev Ramachandra
    • , Verena Pawlak
    •  & Jason N. D. Kerr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Head direction neurons constitute the brain’s compass, and are classically known to indicate head orientation in the horizontal plane. Here, the authors show that head direction neurons form a three-dimensional compass that can also indicate head tilt, and anchors to gravity.

    • Dora E. Angelaki
    • , Julia Ng
    •  & Jean Laurens

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal patterns during working memory show low-frequency oscillatory activity. Here, the authors demonstrate a rhythmic retention of working memory information in theta and alpha frequency ranges. Moreover, phase-locked amplification of the retained information improves working memory performance.

    • Sanne ten Oever
    • , Peter De Weerd
    •  & Alexander T. Sack

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learning is a dynamic process involving many cortical areas. Here, using cortex-wide imaging, the authors show that in mice learning to discriminate between two textures a distinct task related signal flow is enhanced involving a specific association area whereas other association areas are suppressed.

    • Ariel Gilad
    •  & Fritjof Helmchen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    VIP-expressing neurons play a central role in circadian timekeeping within the mammalian central clock. Here the authors use opto- and chemogenetic approaches to show that VIP neuronal activity regulates rhythmic activity in downstream hypothalamic target neurons and their physiological functions.

    • Sarika Paul
    • , Lydia Hanna
    •  & Timothy M. Brown

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous studies implicate the hippocampal–amygdala pathway in contextual fear conditioning, in which animals learn to associate a neutral context with an aversive stimulus and display fear responses to dangerous situations. Here the authors show that selective strengthening of hippocampal–amygdala pathway contributes to encoding adaptive fear memory for threat-predictive context.

    • Woong Bin Kim
    •  & Jun-Hyeong Cho

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many animals show individual left/right biases in motor behaviour, but underlying neural substrates have proven elusive. Here the authors describe neurons that maintain individual, context-dependent lateralisation of swimming behaviour in zebrafish.

    • Eric J. Horstick
    • , Yared Bayleyen
    •  & Harold A. Burgess

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors compare receptive fields and nonlinearities of synaptic inputs, membrane potentials, and spiking activity in the auditory cortex for broadband stimuli revealing distinct differences, which lead to an increase in feature selectivity from neuron input to output. Frequency selectivity is distinctly higher for spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRFs) than for tonal receptive fields (TRFs).

    • Kyunghee X. Kim
    • , Craig A. Atencio
    •  & Christoph E. Schreiner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The regulation of cellular neuronal properties distinct from synaptic plasticity has been proposed as a mechanism of functional network organization. Here, the authors show that the magnitude of five ion currents in basal ganglia projection song system forebrain neurons covary across life, rapidly and dynamically relating to learned features of individual zebra finches’ songs.

    • Arij Daou
    •  & Daniel Margoliash

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural circuits through which the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) exerts its role in epilepsy control are not known. Here the authors reveal that a long-range SNr-parafascicular nucleus disinhibitory circuit participates in regulating seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy and inhibition of this circuit can alleviate severity of epileptic seizures.

    • Bin Chen
    • , Cenglin Xu
    •  & Zhong Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Food intake can be attenuated by visceral aversive stimuli in pathological conditions. Here the authors identify a unilateral neural circuit from the CamKII-positive neurons in the anterior insular cortex to the vGluT2-positive neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that controls feeding responses to visceral aversive stimuli.

    • Yu Wu
    • , Changwan Chen
    •  & Shuang Qiu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extensive research in primates shows that attention to space improves behavioural performance as well as neural responses to stimuli in that location. Here, the authors establish a visual spatial attention task in mice and report on attentional modulation of behaviour, as well as neural correlates from subthreshold responses in single cells to spikes and LFP at network level.

    • Anderson Speed
    • , Joseph Del Rosario
    •  & Bilal Haider

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Learned conditioned fear associations can be weakened (extinction learning), but extinction is less effective if performed too soon after the original fear conditioning. Here, the authors show that persistent activation of CRF-expressing neurons in the central amygdala is involved in the early fear extinction deficit.

    • Yong S. Jo
    • , Vijay Mohan K. Namboodiri
    •  & Larry S. Zweifel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Targeted manipulations of neural activity in the living brain remain a significant challenge. In this study the authors introduce a paramagnetic analog of the drug muscimol that enables targeted neural inactivation to be performed with feedback from magnetic resonance imaging

    • Sarah Bricault
    • , Ali Barandov
    •  & Alan Jasanoff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Acetylcholine regulates intestinal epithelial secretion via muscarinic Gq-coupled receptors but its role in cell differentiation is unclear. Here, the authors show that Prox1-positive endocrine cells are sensors for the cholinergic intestinal niche and can trigger increased differentiation of enteroendocrine DCLK1-positive tuft cells.

    • Moritz Middelhoff
    • , Henrik Nienhüser
    •  & Timothy C. Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sensory stimuli usually arrive simultaneously but the neural-circuit mechanisms that combine multiple streams of sensory information are incompletely understood. The authors here show that visual-auditory pairing drives plasticity in multi-modal neuron networks within the mouse visual cortex.

    • Thomas Knöpfel
    • , Yann Sweeney
    •  & Samuel J. Barnes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Flying insects position their antennae by integrating multisensory inputs across different timescales. This study describes an underlying hierarchical neural circuit that maintains antennal position in a fast and robust manner, whilst retaining flexibility to incorporate slower feedback to modulate position.

    • Dinesh Natesan
    • , Nitesh Saxena
    •  & Sanjay P. Sane

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Zebrafish larvae can binocularly detect prey objects in order to strike but lack ipsilateral retinotectal fibers for binocular superposition of visual information. Here the authors describe commissural intertectal neurons and show that they are required for the initiation of capture strikes.

    • Christoph Gebhardt
    • , Thomas O. Auer
    •  & Filippo Del Bene

Browse broader subjects

Browse Neural circuits across other nature.com journals