Neurophysiology articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    Experiments in mice identify a neural circuit that relays information about infant cries from the maternal auditory thalamus to hypothalamic oxytocin neurons to induce the release of oxytocin and modulate maternal behaviour.

    • Silvana Valtcheva
    • , Habon A. Issa
    •  & Robert C. Froemke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An appetite-regulating subnetwork in humans involving the lateral hypothalamus and the dorsolateral hippocampus is implicated in obesity and related eating disorders.

    • Daniel A. N. Barbosa
    • , Sandra Gattas
    •  & Casey H. Halpern

  • Article |

    Octopus and squid use cephalopod-specific chemotactile receptors to sense their respective marine environments, but structural adaptations in these receptors support the sensation of specific molecules suited to distinct physiological roles.

    • Guipeun Kang
    • , Corey A. H. Allard
    •  & Ryan E. Hibbs

  • Article |

    Visceral pain and anxiety in mice are found to be associated with gut enterochromaffin cells, and genetic models for eliciting visceral hypersensitivity and studying the sex bias of gut pain are proposed.

    • James R. Bayrer
    • , Joel Castro
    •  & David Julius

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Experiments in mice show that the mechanically activated ion channel PIEZO1 is expressed in itch-specific sensory neurons and has a role in transducing mechanical itch.

    • Rose Z. Hill
    • , Meaghan C. Loud
    •  & Ardem Patapoutian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Single-cell profiling of vagal sensory neurons from seven organs in mice and calcium-imaging-guided spatial transcriptomics reveal that interoceptive signals are coded through three distinct dimensions, allowing efficient processing of multiple signals in parallel using a combinatorial strategy.

    • Qiancheng Zhao
    • , Chuyue D. Yu
    •  & Rui B. Chang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Two different cell types in the mediodorsal thalamus have complementary roles in decision-making, with one type of mediodorsal projection amplifying prefrontal activity under low signal levels and one type suppressing it under high noise levels.

    • Arghya Mukherjee
    • , Norman H. Lam
    •  & Michael M. Halassa

  • Article |

    Sharp wave-ripples from the hippocampus are shown to modulate peripheral glucose homeostasis in rats, offering insights into the mechanism that links sleep disruption and blood glucose regulation in type 2 diabetes.

    • David Tingley
    • , Kathryn McClain
    •  & György Buzsáki

  • Article |

    Dynamic interaction of neurons in lateral orbitofrontal cortex with the sensory cortex implements value-prediction computations that are history dependent and error based, providing plasticity essential for flexible decision-making.

    • Abhishek Banerjee
    • , Giuseppe Parente
    •  & Fritjof Helmchen

  • Article |

    Feedback projections onto neurons of the mouse primary visual cortex generate a second excitatory receptive field that is driven by stimuli outside of the classical feedforward receptive field, with responses mediated by higher visual areas.

    • Andreas J. Keller
    • , Morgane M. Roth
    •  & Massimo Scanziani

  • Article |

    In a mouse model, aryl hydrocarbon receptor signalling in enteric neurons is revealed as a mechanism that helps to maintain gut homeostasis by integrating the luminal environment with the physiology of intestinal neural circuits.

    • Yuuki Obata
    • , Álvaro Castaño
    •  & Vassilis Pachnis

  • Article |

    Fluorescence-based polysomnography in zebrafish reveals two major sleep signatures that share features with those of amniotes, which suggests that common neural sleep signatures emerged in the vertebrate brain over 450 million years ago.

    • Louis C. Leung
    • , Gordon X. Wang
    •  & Philippe Mourrain

  • Letter |

    Shark and skate electrosensory cells use specific potassium channels to support either indiscriminate detection of electrical stimuli or selective frequency tuning, respectively, demonstrating adaptation of sensory systems through discrete molecular modifications.

    • Nicholas W. Bellono
    • , Duncan B. Leitch
    •  & David Julius

  • Letter |

    Three transient receptor potential channels (TRPA1, TRPV1 and TRPM3) mediate sensitivity to acute noxious heat in mice in a redundant system; mice lacking all three show severe deficits in heat sensing, whereas double-knockout mice do not.

    • Ine Vandewauw
    • , Katrien De Clercq
    •  & Thomas Voets

  • Letter |

    X-ray and cryo-electron microscopy structures of the acid-sensing ion channel ASIC1a reveal the molecular mechanisms of channel gating and desensitization.

    • Nate Yoder
    • , Craig Yoshioka
    •  & Eric Gouaux

  • Article |

    Detection of weak electrical signals by skates relies on functional coupling of specific calcium and potassium channels, which mediates oscillations in electrosensory cell membrane voltage.

    • Nicholas W. Bellono
    • , Duncan B. Leitch
    •  & David Julius

  • Letter |

    The neuronal mechanism for the detection of non-painful warm stimuli has remained unclear; mammalian TRPM2 ion channel is shown to be required for warmth detection in the non-noxious range of 33–38 °C, and surprisingly to mediate responses to warmth in the autonomic nervous system.

    • Chun-Hsiang Tan
    •  & Peter A. McNaughton

  • Letter |

    Sleep-promoting neurons in Drosophila are shown to switch between electrical activity and silence as a function of sleep need; the switch is operated by dopamine and involves the antagonistic regulation of two potassium channels.

    • Diogo Pimentel
    • , Jeffrey M. Donlea
    •  & Gero Miesenböck

  • Letter |

    Increased activity of dopamine receptor type-2 (D2R)-expressing cells in the nucleus accumbens of rats during a ‘decision’ period reflects a ‘loss’ outcome of the previous decision and predicts a subsequent safe choice; by artificially increasing the activity of D2R neurons during the decision period, risk-seeking rats could be converted to risk-avoiding rats.

    • Kelly A. Zalocusky
    • , Charu Ramakrishnan
    •  & Karl Deisseroth

  • Letter |

    The authors trained mice to attend to or suppress vision based on behavioral context and show, through novel and established techniques, that changes in visual gain rely on tunable feedforward inhibition of visual thalamus via innervating thalamic reticular neurons; these findings introduce a subcortical model of attention in which modality-specific thalamic reticular subnetworks mediate top-down and context-dependent control of sensory selection.

    • Ralf D. Wimmer
    • , L. Ian Schmitt
    •  & Michael M. Halassa

  • Letter |

    Cyclic voltammetry reveals an extended mode of reward-predictive dopamine signalling in the striatum as rats navigate; signals increase as the rats approach distant rewards, instead of showing phasic or steady tonic activity, and the increases scale flexibly with the distance and size of the rewards.

    • Mark W. Howe
    • , Patrick L. Tierney
    •  & Ann M. Graybiel

  • Letter |

    A pair of Drosophila brain cells is identified and its activation alone is found to induce the fly’s complete feeding motor routine when artificially induced; suppressing or ablating these two neurons eliminates the sugar-induced feeding behaviour, but ablation of just one neuron results in asymmetric movements.

    • Thomas F. Flood
    • , Shinya Iguchi
    •  & Motojiro Yoshihara

  • Article |

    It is known that compressed sequences of hippocampal place cells can ‘replay’ previous navigational trajectories in linearly constrained mazes; here, rat place-cell sequences representing two-dimensional spatial trajectories were observed before navigational decisions, and predicted the immediate navigational path.

    • Brad E. Pfeiffer
    •  & David J. Foster

  • News & Views |

    Producing a single image from two eyes requires complex brain circuitry. A comparison of neural responses in babies shows that early visual stimulation following premature birth leads to accelerated development of the visual system.

    • Eileen Birch

  • Letter |

    The voltage-gated calcium channel protein subunit α2δ is shown to control both the abundance of voltage-gated calcium channels and their coupling to the vesicular release of neurotransmitters into the synapse; because the α2δ family is a known target of potent analgesics, this study offers a new link between basic synaptic physiology and pain research in the clinic.

    • Michael B. Hoppa
    • , Beatrice Lana
    •  & Timothy A. Ryan

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