Featured
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News |
Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize
Vision scientists award 'Oscar of perception' to Japanese mathematician.
- Chaz Firestone
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News |
Mice pull pained expressions
Animal and human faces display similar responses to suffering.
- Janelle Weaver
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Research Highlights |
Cognitive neuroscience: Attention please!
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Research Highlights |
Neuroscience: What makes masculinity?
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News Feature |
Neuroscience: Illuminating the brain
Systems neuroscientists are pushing aside their electrophysiology rigs to make room for the tools of 'optogenetics'. Lizzie Buchen reports from a field in the process of reinvention.
- Lizzie Buchen
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Letter |
Mutations of optineurin in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a disorder characterized by the degeneration of motor neurons. About 10% of cases are familial, but the mutations identified in these families account for only 20–30% of such cases. Here a new set of mutations in familial ALS is found — in the gene encoding optineurin. Given the effect of optineurin mutations on the NF-κB protein, it is suggested that inhibiting NF-κB might be useful in treating ALS.
- Hirofumi Maruyama
- , Hiroyuki Morino
- & Hideshi Kawakami
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Article |
Lateral competition for cortical space by layer-specific horizontal circuits
A common anatomical feature of the sensory cortex in many species is that neurons with similar features cluster into vertically orientated domains spanning all layers of the cortex. Moreover, neurons in one domain modulate neurons in neighbouring domains through horizontal connections. A combination of techniques has now been used to show that such horizontal projections suppress layers of cortex devoted to processing inputs, but facilitate layers devoted to outputs.
- Hillel Adesnik
- & Massimo Scanziani
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Research Highlights |
Neuroscience: Relief from pain
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Correspondence |
Actions speak louder than words to prevent language extinctions
- Yoshina Gautam
- & Aashish Jha
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Research Highlights |
Neuroscience: Sharpening social skills
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News & Views |
Signals far and away
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
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News and Views Q&A |
Magnetic-field perception
The ability to perceive Earth's magnetic field, which at one time was dismissed as a physical impossibility, is now known to exist in diverse animals. The receptors for the magnetic sense remain elusive. But it seems that at least two underlying mechanisms exist — sometimes in the same organism.
- Kenneth J. Lohmann
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News |
No gain from brain training
Computerized mental workouts don't boost mental skills, study claims.
- Alla Katsnelson
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Letter |
Putting brain training to the test
Millions of pounds per year are spent on various 'brain-training' programs; however, the efficacy and performance of these training regimes is still unclear. In collaboration with the BBC, a six-week online study of brain training was conducted. Although improvements were observed in the specific tasks used for training, in the authors' view there was no evidence that these improvements transferred to other untrained cognitive tasks.
- Adrian M. Owen
- , Adam Hampshire
- & Clive G. Ballard
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Letter |
The scaffold protein Ste5 directly controls a switch-like mating decision in yeast
Before mating, a yeast cell must detect a partner cell that is close enough and expresses sufficiently large amounts of a sex pheromone. The mating decision is an all-or-none, switch-like response to pheromone concentration. It is now shown that this decision involves the competition of one kinase and one phosphatase enzyme for multiple phosphorylation sites on a 'scaffold' protein. The results should prompt a re-evaluation of the role of related signalling molecules that have been implicated in cancer.
- Mohan K. Malleshaiah
- , Vahid Shahrezaei
- & Stephen W. Michnick
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Letter |
Native GABAB receptors are heteromultimers with a family of auxiliary subunits
GABAB receptors are the G-protein-coupled receptors for γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. Here, functional proteomics is used to show that GABAB receptors in the brain are complexes of GABAB1, GABAB2 and members of a subfamily of KCTD proteins. The KCTD proteins increase the potency of agonists and markedly alter the G-protein signalling of the receptors, suggesting that they determine the pharmacology and kinetics of the receptor response.
- Jochen Schwenk
- , Michaela Metz
- & Bernhard Bettler
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News |
Party drug could ease trauma long term
Pilot studies demonstrate effectiveness of MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Lizzie Buchen
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Research Highlights |
Neuroscience: Stressing memory
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Research Highlights |
Pathology: Bent out of shape
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Article |
Widespread transcription at neuronal activity-regulated enhancers
Regulatory proteins bind non-coding DNA either at promoters (near to a gene's transcription start site) or at enhancers (far away). Binding at enhancers helps to bring the transcription enzyme RNA polymerase to promoters. Here, studies of some 12,000 enhancers that respond to electrical activity in neurons show that binding to enhancers also brings the polymerase to the enhancers themselves, where it transcribes a novel class of non-coding RNAs. Enhancers may thus be more similar to promoters than hitherto appreciated.
- Tae-Kyung Kim
- , Martin Hemberg
- & Michael E. Greenberg
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Article |
Olfactory pattern classification by discrete neuronal network states
The brain is apt to sort sensory stimuli into discrete perceptual categories, but the neuronal activity behind this capability has been unclear. Here, the problem has been investigated by presenting zebrafish with different concentrations or types of odours. The results show that the activity of neuronal populations in the olfactory bulb is largely insensitive to changes in odour concentration, but that morphing one odour into another produces abrupt transitions between odour representations.
- Jörn Niessing
- & Rainer W. Friedrich
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News |
Children who form no racial stereotypes found
Brain disorder eradicates ethnic but not gender bias.
- Janelle Weaver
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Research Highlights |
Wildlife biology: Pitch shifter
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Research Highlights |
Cancer biology: Brain tumour trigger
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Research Highlights |
Animal behaviour: Tortoise see, tortoise do
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News |
Airborne pigeons obey the pecking order
During flight, pigeons in a flock follow the leader.
- Janelle Weaver
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Editorial |
Learning in the wild
Much of what people know about science is learned informally. Education policy-makers should take note.
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Books & Arts |
Why music moves us
Daniel J. Levitin enjoys a book that explains how rhythm, pitch and timbre are combined, and why the most delightful compositions balance predictability and surprise.
- Daniel J. Levitin
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Letter |
Learning-related fine-scale specificity imaged in motor cortex circuits of behaving mice
It is generally accepted that specific neuronal circuits in the brain's cortex drive behavioural execution, but the relationship between the performance of a task and the function of a circuit is unknown. Here, this problem was tackled by using a technique that allows many neurons within the same circuit to be monitored simultaneously. The findings indicate that enhanced correlated activity in specific ensembles of neurons can identify and encode specific behavioural responses while a task is learned.
- Takaki Komiyama
- , Takashi R. Sato
- & Karel Svoboda
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Letter |
The molecular basis for water taste in Drosophila
Animals must detect water in their environment to stay alive, but the molecular basis for water detection has been unclear. Here the essential mediators of water-sensing and drinking in fruitflies have been identified: an ion channel of the degenerin/epithelial sodium channel family, and the sensory neurons that make it.
- Peter Cameron
- , Makoto Hiroi
- & Kristin Scott
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Research Highlights |
Evolution: Sex and immunity
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News & Views |
Each synapse to its own
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
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Letter |
Impaired hippocampal–prefrontal synchrony in a genetic mouse model of schizophrenia
A deletion on human chromosome 22 (22q11.2) is one of the largest genetic risk factors for schizophrenia. Mice with a corresponding deletion have problems with working memory, one feature of schizophrenia. It is now found that these mice also show disruptions in synchronous firing between neurons of the prefrontal cortex and of the hippocampus, an electrophysiological phenomenon that has been linked to learning and memory and which is also thought to be disrupted in schizophrenia patients.
- Torfi Sigurdsson
- , Kimberly L. Stark
- & Joshua A. Gordon
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Article |
Dendritic organization of sensory input to cortical neurons in vivo
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
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Letter |
Control of cortical GABA circuitry development by Nrg1 and ErbB4 signalling
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
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Letter
| Open AccessThe genome of a songbird
The genome of the zebra finch — a songbird and a model for studying the vertebrate brain, behaviour and evolution — has been sequenced. Comparison with the chicken genome, the only other bird genome available, shows that genes that have neural function and are implicated in the cognitive processing of song have been evolving rapidly in the finch lineage. Moreover, vocal communication engages much of the transcriptome of the zebra finch brain.
- Wesley C. Warren
- , David F. Clayton
- & Richard K. Wilson
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Research Highlights |
Neuropsychology: Morality of murder
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Research Highlights |
Addiction: Junk-food junkies
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Research Highlights |
Neurodevelopment: Baby talk
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Letter |
Caspase activation precedes and leads to tangles
Fibrillar deposits of tau protein (neurofibrillary tangles) are thought to cause neuronal death in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and tau-related frontotemporal dementia. Here, however, the opposite has been found: the activation of executioner caspase enzymes occurs first, preceding tangle formation by hours to days. Tangle-bearing neurons seem to be long-lived, indicating that tangles might be 'off pathway' to acute neuronal death.
- Alix de Calignon
- , Leora M. Fox
- & Bradley T. Hyman
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Article |
Neurogenic radial glia in the outer subventricular zone of human neocortex
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
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Research Highlights |
Neuroscience: Live-action brain cells
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Opinion |
How do morals change?
Emotions such as empathy and disgust might be at the root of morality, but psychologists should also study the roles of deliberation and debate in how our opinions shift over time, argues Paul Bloom.
- Paul Bloom
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Letter |
Human memory strength is predicted by theta-frequency phase-locking of single neurons
Although explored in the rodent, the relationship between single neuron activity, oscillations and behavioural learning is unknown in humans. Here, successful memory formation in humans was predicted by the coordination of spike timing relative to the local theta oscillation. These data provide a direct connection between the behavioural modulation of oscillations and plasticity within specific circuits.
- Ueli Rutishauser
- , Ian B. Ross
- & Erin M. Schuman
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Review Article |
Neural mechanisms of ageing and cognitive decline
- Nicholas A. Bishop
- , Tao Lu
- & Bruce A. Yankner
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Letter |
Post-copulatory sexual selection and sexual conflict in the evolution of male pregnancy
Male pregnancy is restricted to seahorses, pipefishes and their relatives, in which young are nurtured in the male's brood pouch. It is now clear that the brood pouch has a further function. Studies of Gulf pipefish show that males can selectively abort embryos from females perceived as less attractive, saving resources for more hopeful prospects later. This is the only known example of post-copulatory sexual conflict in a sex-reversed species.
- Kimberly A. Paczolt
- & Adam G. Jones
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