Neural circuits articles within Nature Communications

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  • 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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In vivo laser ablation of dendrites in single L2/3 pyramidal neurons reveals that neuronal orientation tuning in V1 is robust to loss of dendritic input. Orientation tuning functions remain unchanged following apical dendrite ablation and change only slightly upon loss of two primary basal dendrites.

    • Jiyoung Park
    • , Athanasia Papoutsi
    •  & Stelios M. Smirnakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a sleep phase characterised by random eye movements for which the underlying motor commands are yet to be revealed. The authors describe that a cluster of medulla oblongata neurons in the Nucleus papiliocontributes to the control of eye movements during REM sleep.

    • C. Gutierrez Herrera
    • , F. Girard
    •  & M. R. Celio

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Glutamatergic neurons in the mammalian cortex are born from a heterogeneous pool of embryonic progenitors, however, it is unclear how these different progenitors contribute to diversity within the mature cortex. In this study, authors combine in utero progenitor labeling techniques with targeted Patch-Seq methods and high resolution synaptic circuit mapping in the mature mouse cortex to show that intermediate progenitors can generate restricted sets of transcriptomically-defined glutamatergic neurons that have distinct patterns of local and long-range synaptic connections.

    • Tommas J. Ellender
    • , Sophie V. Avery
    •  & Colin J. Akerman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In congenitally blind people, tactile stimuli can activate the occipital (visual) cortex. Here, the authors show using magnetoencephalography (MEG) that occipital activation can occur within 35 ms following tactile stimulation, suggesting the existence of a fast thalamocortical pathway for touch in congenitally blind humans.

    • Franziska Müller
    • , Guiomar Niso
    •  & Ron Kupers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Several cortical association areas have rapidly expanded in size during human evolution, including elements of the central cognitive default mode network (DMN). Here, the authors show that genes highly divergent between humans and other primates (HAR genes) are particularly expressed in these brain regions.

    • Yongbin Wei
    • , Siemon C. de Lange
    •  & Martijn P. van den Heuvel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal tuning is typically measured in response to a priori defined behavioural variables of interest. Here, the authors use an unsupervised learning approach to recover neuronal tuning with respect to the recorded network activity and show that this can reveal the relevant behavioural variables.

    • Alon Rubin
    • , Liron Sheintuch
    •  & Yaniv Ziv

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been challenging to perform super-resolution imaging in large volumes due to aberrations encountered. Here, the authors combine single-wavelength Bessel lightsheet localization microscopy with tissue clearing techniques and image neurons across the whole brain of adult fruit flies.

    • Li-An Chu
    • , Chieh-Han Lu
    •  & Bi-Chang Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs) are a powerful tool for neuroscience, but the standard DREADD ligand, CNO, has significant drawbacks. Here the authors report two novel high-potency DREADD ligands and a novel DREADD radiotracer for imaging purposes.

    • Jordi Bonaventura
    • , Mark A. G. Eldridge
    •  & Michael Michaelides

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In addition to serotonin neurons, the dorsal raphe nucleus (DR) also contains dopamine, glutamate, and GABA neurons. Here, the authors systematically compare the neurochemical identity, cell type specificity, anatomical distribution, and connectivity of DR cells targeted by commonly used Cre lines.

    • Daniel F. Cardozo Pinto
    • , Hongbin Yang
    •  & Stephan Lammel

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