Synaptic Pruning articles from across Nature Portfolio

Latest Research and News

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  Experience modifies the synaptome architecture in the developing and adult mouse brain

  Synaptome architecture describes the spatiotemporal distribution of highly diverse excitatory synapses throughout the brain. Whether and how this architecture is impacted by experience and sensory input is unknown. We found that environmental...

  • Hanan Woods
  • Ülkü Günar
  • Seth G. N. Grant

  Article Open access 11 November 2026 Nature Communications

• AutoSNAP enables automated nerve segmentation and morphometry quantification

  Accurate morphometric analysis is essential to studying nerve development, injury, and regeneration, but current approaches are inefficient, inconsistent, or inaccessible. Here, we present AutoSNAP, a deep learning framework for automated nerve...

  • Sundeep Chakladar
  • Owen Lee
  • David M. Brogan

  Article Open access 10 November 2026 Scientific Reports
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  PV interneuron plasticity for neuropsychiatric disorders

  • Pico Caroni

  Article 10 November 2026 Cell Research
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  Physiological APP processing is required for synaptic plasticity and cognition

  While the accumulation of Aβ peptides, derived by proteolytic cleavage from the amyloid precursor protein APP, constitutes a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, the question of whether endogenous, physiological APP processing serves an essential role...

  • Lara Kilian
  • Verena Bengelsdorff
  • Ulrike C. Müller

  Article Open access 04 November 2026 Cell Death & Disease

• Proapoptotic RHG proteins and mitochondria are required for sensory dendrite pruning in Drosophila

  Caspases are best known for their role in apoptosis, but they are also deployed sub-lethally during development, where they contribute to cell fate specification, migration and terminal differentiation. How neurons activate executioner caspases...

  • Amrita Mukherjee
  • Ryan Pei-Yen Cheng
  • Darren W. Williams

  Article Open access 03 November 2026 Scientific Reports

• DNA-driven dimerization of Ku70/Ku80 regulates the synapsis of double-strand breaks by APLF

  Repair of double-strand breaks via non-homologous end joining requires the synapsis of DNA ends. APLF is emerging as an important repair factor, capable of forming synaptic bridges in the presence of the Ku70/Ku80 heterodimer. However, only a single...

  • Raman van Wee
  • Sara De Bragança
  • Philipp Kukura

  Article Open access 03 November 2026 Nature Communications

• Sleep-sensitive neurons mediate consolidation

  • Katherine Whalley

  Article 02 November 2026 Nature Reviews Neuroscience

• It’s time to split

  • William P. Olson

  Article 02 November 2026 Nature Neuroscience

• Biologically interpretable multi-scale feature engineering with two-stage pruning for tomato leaf disease classification

  Automated tomato leaf disease classification remains challenging when different diseases exhibit similar color, texture, and necrotic symptoms. To improve pathological interpretability while maintaining competitive classification performance, this...

  • Peng Wang
  • Zhiwen Zhou
  • Yunsheng Wang

  Article Open access 31 October 2026 Scientific Reports
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  Comparative and explainable deep learning for cherry (Prunus avium L.) cultivar classification using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and transformer architectures

  Accurate identification of cherry (Prunus aviumL.) cultivars is essential for automated sorting, postharvest management, and cultivar-specific quality control in modern horticultural systems. However, fine-grained classification remains highly...

  • Bünyamin Demir
  • Fatih Ünal
  • Yazgan Tunç

  Article Open access 30 October 2026 Scientific Reports
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  Synaptic transmission and plasticity: molecular mechanisms, biological functions and therapeutic opportunities in neurodegenerative diseases

  Synaptic transmission impairment and neuronal loss are hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs). To date, the absence of effective therapies for treating or preventing NDDs underscores the critical need to comprehend the mechanisms underlying...

  • Jianxu Sun
  • Ge Gao
  • Tie-Shan Tang

  Article Open access 29 October 2026 Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy
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  Spintronic neuromorphic hardware using domain wall-based neurons and quantized synapses

  We simulate the functionality of an artificial neuron and synapse using spin-orbit torque-based spintronic devices and implement a fully connected artificial neural network (ANN). These neuro-synaptic devices are emulated via transverse domain wall...

  • Sakshi Kiran Bandekar
  • Arnab Ganguly
  • Debasis Das

  Article Open access 28 October 2026 npj Spintronics

• Thrombin reshapes α-synuclein biochemical properties by N-terminal truncation

  Proteolytic processing of α-Synuclein (Syn) contributes to the molecular diversity and toxicity of its aggregates in Parkinson’s disease, yet the proteases responsible for disease-relevant truncations remain incompletely defined. Here, we show that...

  • Philipp Trolese
  • Benedetta Fongaro
  • Patrizia Polverino de Laureto

  Article Open access 28 October 2026 Nature Communications
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  Perinatal elimination of genetically aberrant human cortical neurons

  Human neurons are postmitotic and long-lived, requiring precise genomic regulation. Normal neuronal function is highly dosage-sensitive, with copy number variants (CNVs) and heterozygous point mutations associated with a host of neurodevelopmental...

  • Diane D. Shao
  • Yifan Zhao
  • Christopher A. Walsh

  Article Open access 28 October 2026 Nature

• Shapley-guided token pruning for real-time remote sensing scene classification on edge devices

  Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel at remote sensing scene classification, but the quadratic cost of self-attention hinders real-time inference on edge platforms such as on-board satellite and UAV payloads. Token pruning accelerates ViTs, yet...

  • Chaoyu Li
  • Tianyu Zhou

  Article Open access 27 October 2026 Scientific Reports

• Disrupted glial-mediated synaptic refinement in Fragile X syndrome

  Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability and autism, results from the loss of the RNA-binding protein fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP). FMRP is a translational regulator and is highly expressed...

  • Lindsey Starr
  • Melissa Lee
  • Carol Mason

  Article Open access 25 October 2026 Scientific Reports

• A synaptic mitochondrion–ribbon–vesicle complex organizes photoreceptor neurotransmission

  Photoreceptor synapses rely on mitochondria, synaptic ribbons, and vesicles, yet how these elements integrate into functional units remains unclear. Here we show, using focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) and electrophysiology,...

  • Fenglan Wang
  • Wenna Zhao
  • Jun Zhang

  Article Open access 24 October 2026 Nature Communications

• HGCN-GRU: temporal memory learning for hypergraph sequential recommendation

  Sequential recommendation systems aim to predict users’ future interactions by modeling the temporal evolution of their preferences. Hypergraph-based representations are particularly well suited to this setting because they can capture high-order,...

  • Fateme Saghafi
  • Sayeh Mirzaei

  Article Open access 22 October 2026 Scientific Reports

• Regional synergetic effects of ice and snow consumption based on a BERT neural network

  This study takes Harbin Ice-Snow World as a key case and develops an integrated framework based on a BERT neural network and regional economic analysis to quantify and analyze regional synergy associated with ice-snow consumption. The framework...

  • Yanqi Liu
  • Shibo Zhi

  Article Open access 22 October 2026 Scientific Reports

• NHEJ-mediated DNA synapsis and RPA-driven MRX exonuclease balance DNA end resection to control DSB repair

  DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are repaired by Ku-dependent non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) or DNA end resection-dependent homologous recombination (HR). Previously, it was shown that short-range resection by MRX-pSae2 can remove Ku from DSBs and...

  • Stefan Braunshier
  • Elda Cannavo
  • Petr Cejka

  Article Open access 22 October 2026 Nature Communications