Neural circuits articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multicolour images are difficult to acquire with large-scale microscopy approaches. Here the authors present a microtome-assisted microscope capable of trichromatic two-photon excitation and label-free nonlinear modalities based on wavelength mixing, and use it to analyze astrocyte morphology and neuronal projections in thick brain samples.

    • Lamiae Abdeladim
    • , Katherine S. Matho
    •  & Emmanuel Beaurepaire

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some cortical neurons fire together like a synchronized chorus, while others fire independently like soloists. Here, the authors show that soloist neurons in motor cortex tend to control body movements, while the choristers do not, and that soloists can become choristers by increasing inhibition.

    • Patrick A. Kells
    • , Shree Hari Gautam
    •  & Woodrow L. Shew

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Astrocytes can dynamically control glutamate availability at specific active synapses through the glutamate transporter, GLT-1. Here, the authors show that astrocytes in the VTA selectively facilitate excitation of VTA GABAergic neurons to inhibit dopamine neurons and drive avoidance behavior via GLT-1.

    • J. A. Gomez
    • , J. M. Perkins
    •  & C. A. Paladini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many functions of the human brain are lateralised i.e. associated more strongly with either the left or the right hemisphere of the brain. Here, the authors report the first complete map of functional asymmetries in the human brain, and its relationship with structural inter-hemispheric connectivity.

    • Vyacheslav R. Karolis
    • , Maurizio Corbetta
    •  & Michel Thiebaut de Schotten

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous studies have highlighted a paradoxical role of perisomatic-targeting parvalbumin-positive (PV+) interneurons in ictogenesis. Here, authors used an acute in vivo model of focal cortical seizures in awake behaving mice to show that photo-depolarization of PV+ interneurons rapidly switches from an anti-ictal to a pro-ictal effect within a few seconds of seizure initiation, and that this switch can be prevented by overexpression of the neuronal potassium-chloride co-transporter KCC2 in principal cortical neurons.

    • Vincent Magloire
    • , Jonathan Cornford
    •  & Ivan Pavlov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with symptoms ranging from sensory hypersensitivity to social difficulties. Here, the authors provide evidence of atypical connectivity transitions between sensory and higher-order cortical areas in people with ASD, which could underlie the diverse symptoms.

    • Seok-Jun Hong
    • , Reinder Vos de Wael
    •  & Boris C. Bernhardt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gamma oscillations in somatosensory areas in humans correlate with pain perception and pain stimulus intensity, but could also reflect cognitive processes such as attention. Here the authors provide evidence in mice that these oscillations causally contribute to pain perception.

    • Linette Liqi Tan
    • , Manfred Josef Oswald
    •  & Rohini Kuner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early neuropsychological studies suggested that different aspects of working memory (WM) are exclusively associated with specific brain areas. Here, the authors show, using machine-learning analysis of fMRI, how WM processes are dynamically coded by large-scale overlapping networks in the human brain.

    • Eyal Soreq
    • , Robert Leech
    •  & Adam Hampshire

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lifestyle factors such as smoking and exercise contribute to the health of the brain during aging, but previous studies have focused on the effects of single lifestyle variables. Here, the authors examine the combined and individual effects of four lifestyle variables on brain structure and function.

    • Nora Bittner
    • , Christiane Jockwitz
    •  & Svenja Caspers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An unresolved problem in neuroscience is to determine the relevant timescale for understanding spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain. Here, the authors introduce a new framework to study the different timescales through binning the output of a generative model of neural activity.

    • Gustavo Deco
    • , Josephine Cruzat
    •  & Morten L. Kringelbach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The precise role of auditory cortical and thalamic projections in the representation of sound in the auditory striatum is not known. Here, the authors show that silencing thalamic inputs lowers the gain of sound-evoked responses while cortical inputs only affect the best frequency responses of striatal neurons.

    • Liang Chen
    • , Xinxing Wang
    •  & Qiaojie Xiong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Choices between goods often depend on the action costs, but the mechanisms underlying economic decisions under variable action cost are poorly understood. Here, the authors record from neurons in the monkey orbitofrontal cortex and show that decisions under variable action cost were made in a non-spatial representation.

    • Xinying Cai
    •  & Camillo Padoa-Schioppa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Serotonin is released throughout the brain from diverse projections of neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus. Here, the authors use optogenetics and fMRI mediated mapping of the mouse brain-wide serotonin network in response to acute stress and treatment with SSRI.

    • Joanes Grandjean
    • , Alberto Corcoba
    •  & Bechara J. Saab

  • Article
    | Open Access

    To explain the neural correlates of behavior and its variability, one must analyze single-trial population dynamics. Here, the authors develop a statistical method that extracts low-dimensional dynamics that explain behavior better than high-dimensional neural activity revealing unexpected structure.

    • Ziqiang Wei
    • , Hidehiko Inagaki
    •  & Shaul Druckmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In order to adjust expectations efficiently, prediction errors need to be associated with the features that gave rise to the unexpected outcome. Here, the authors show that neurons in anterior fronto-striatal networks encode prediction errors that are specific to feature values of different stimulus dimensions.

    • Mariann Oemisch
    • , Stephanie Westendorff
    •  & Thilo Womelsdorf

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The reorientation response of Drosophila larva to light is an innate behaviour. Here the authors identify a pair of GABAergic neurons that mediate a disinhibitory mechanism that regulates the larval reorientation response.

    • Weiqiao Zhao
    • , Peipei Zhou
    •  & Zhefeng Gong

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pulvinar is involved in vision and attention, but its interactions with other brain regions are little-studied. Here, using fMRI the authors show that the human pulvinar has widespread functional coupling with cortical areas that reflects its intrinsic organization and the topographic layout of cortex.

    • Michael J. Arcaro
    • , Mark A. Pinsk
    •  & Sabine Kastner

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Transcranial electrical stimulation techniques, such as tDCS and tACS, are popular tools for neuroscience and clinical therapy, but how low-intensity current might modulate brain activity remains unclear. In this review, the authors review the evidence on mechanisms of transcranial electrical stimulation.

    • Anli Liu
    • , Mihály Vöröslakos
    •  & György Buzsáki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Inter-areal interaction has been shown to support various cognitive functions. Here, the authors report that neurons in area 36 flexibly synchronize their activity with different layers of area TE within different epochs of a visually cued recall task suggesting dynamic rerouting of information.

    • Masaki Takeda
    • , Toshiyuki Hirabayashi
    •  & Yasushi Miyashita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous work has shown that the thalamic nucleus reuniens (RE) is involved in memory and emotion. Here the authors report that the RE and its inputs from the medial prefrontal cortex are indispensable for the top-down inhibition of fear memories after extinction.

    • Karthik R. Ramanathan
    • , Jingji Jin
    •  & Stephen Maren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sex pheromones that increase mating have been reported across a number of different species, yet there is little known about pheromones that suppress female mating drive. This study reports that juvenile female mice release a pheromone, ESP22, which suppresses sexual receptivity of adult female mice by evoking a robust rejection behavior upon male mounting.

    • Takuya Osakada
    • , Kentaro K. Ishii
    •  & Kazushige Touhara

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Direct electrical brain stimulation can induce widespread changes in neural activity, offering a means to modulate network-wide activity and treat disease. Here, the authors show that the low-frequency functional connectivity profile of a stimulation target predicts where induced theta activity occurs.

    • E. A. Solomon
    • , J. E. Kragel
    •  & M. J. Kahana

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Little is known about how stimuli of different intensities result in different behavioral outcomes in C. elegans. In this study, the authors demonstrate how distinct signal patterns, involving different glutamate receptors, in a single interneuron AIB can encode differential behavioral outputs depending on the stimulus intensity

    • Wenjuan Zou
    • , Jiajun Fu
    •  & Tao Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The central circadian clock in Drosophila is made up of ~ 150 anatomically distributed neurons; the circuits underlying photoentrainment is unclear. This study describes ex vivo patch-clamp recording of the eye-mediated light response of all known circadian clock neurons, and shows that they are organized in parallel circuits centered around a hub.

    • Meng-Tong Li
    • , Li-Hui Cao
    •  & Dong-Gen Luo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although the CA2 region of the hippocampus has been implicated in social memory, its precise role has been unclear. Here, the authors show that the dorsal subregion of CA2 is required for the encoding, consolidation and recall of social memory through a circuit linking it to ventral CA1.

    • Torcato Meira
    • , Felix Leroy
    •  & Steven A. Siegelbaum

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anatomical lesions of the preoptic area (POA) can cause sleep loss while electrical, chemical, or thermal stimulation of POA can induce sleep. To better understand the exact neural function of the POA, this study shows that galanin and GABA+ inhibitory neurons in the ventrolateral POA that project to the wake-promoting tuberomammillary nucleus promote sleep in a stimulation frequency dependent manner.

    • Daniel Kroeger
    • , Gianna Absi
    •  & Ramalingam Vetrivelan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parvalbumin and somatostatin expressing interneurons mediate lateral inhibition between cortical neurons. Here the authors report the mechanisms by which acetylcholine from the basal forebrain selectively augments lateral inhibition via Martinotti cells and show that this is conserved in humans.

    • Joshua Obermayer
    • , Tim S. Heistek
    •  & Huibert D. Mansvelder

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is believed that fast “ripple” oscillations in the hippocampus play a role in consolidation, a process by which memory traces are stabilized. Here, the authors show that ripples occuring during non-REM sleep trigger “replay” of brain activity associated with previously experienced stimuli.

    • Hui Zhang
    • , Juergen Fell
    •  & Nikolai Axmacher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful technique for measuring human brain activity, but the statistical analysis of fMRI data can be difficult. Here, the authors introduce a new fMRI analysis tool, LISA, which provides increased statistical power compared to existing techniques.

    • Gabriele Lohmann
    • , Johannes Stelzer
    •  & Klaus Scheffler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    During active touch, sensory responses to object touch are gated at the level of thalamus and cortex. Here, the authors report gating at the level of the brainstem and show that an intact somatosensory cortex is essential for this response modulation.

    • Shubhodeep Chakrabarti
    •  & Cornelius Schwarz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There are two subtypes of hippocampal theta oscillations that differ in frequency range, pharmacology, and behavioural correlates. Here, the authors report that activity of OLM interneurons in the ventral hippocampus mediates type 2 theta, associated with increased risk-taking in the presence of predator threat.

    • Sanja Mikulovic
    • , Carlos Ernesto Restrepo
    •  & Richardson N. Leão

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recording the activity of neurons over large brain regions requires expanding the field of view of the optics without losing on spatial and temporal resolution. Here, the authors report a micro-opto-mechanical device that enables two-photon imaging across distant motor areas around 6 mm apart in the mouse.

    • Shin-Ichiro Terada
    • , Kenta Kobayashi
    •  & Masanori Matsuzaki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Superior colliculus (SC) and frontal eye fields (FEF) contain visuo-motor maps but their contributions to selective attention are not fully understood. Here, the authors perform reversible inactivations of the SC or FEF and report that loss of SC activity has a more devastating effect on attention.

    • Anil Bollimunta
    • , Amarender R. Bogadhi
    •  & Richard J. Krauzlis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How corticostriatal connections of different pyramidal cell types are organized, particularly in convergent circuits, has not been evaluated in detail. Here, cell type-specific Cre-driver mice reveal that pyramidal tract-type corticostriatal projections, though broadly similar to intratelencephalic-type projections from the same cortical region, are generally more restricted and variable in their topographic termination patterns.

    • Bryan M. Hooks
    • , Andrew E. Papale
    •  & Charles R. Gerfen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Locomotor circuits in the spinal cord produce precise movements with variations in timing and vigor. Here, the authors report that such motor flexibility is generated through the specificity of connections between subtypes of V2a interneurons and motoneuron populations and their distinct plasticity mechanisms.

    • Jianren Song
    • , Elin Dahlberg
    •  & Abdeljabbar El Manira

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Striatal GABAergic interneurons regulate the influence of cortical inputs on striatal projection neurons through feedforward inhibition. Here, the authors report that this inhibition is mediated mainly by PV interneurons in the dorsolateral striatum and SOM interneurons in the dorsomedial striatum.

    • Elodie Fino
    • , Marie Vandecasteele
    •  & Laurent Venance

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