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Kodama et al. show that microglia from male and female adult mice have distinct microRNA profiles and that loss of microglial microRNAs leads to sex-specific changes in the microglial transcriptome and tau pathology.
Although Bayesian models provide good accounts of perceptual decisions, it is unclear how their components are represented in the brain. This paper addresses this question by showing that uncertainty decoded from visual cortex helps predict behavior.
Gulli et al. record neurons in the monkey hippocampus during multiple tasks in a virtual reality environment and find that spatial coding is task-dependent. Their analyses reveal rich nonspatial sensory and mnemonic coding of task-related features.
By comparing neural responses to diverse visual stimuli measured with a standardized two-photon imaging pipeline, the authors reveal response specializations within the mouse visual cortex.
Kappes et al. report a new confirmation bias mechanism. When faced with disagreement, a reduction in the neural sensitivity to the confidence of others is observed leading to a subsequent failure to use others’ confidence to alter one’s own.
Graves et al. demonstrate that as the neurotransmitter dopamine cycles through the cytosol at release sites, it can be metabolized by a mitochondrial enzyme to help generate the energy necessary to sustain synaptic function.
Scheggia et al. show that a specific subpopulation of cortical neurons expressing somatostatin in the prefrontal cortex has a primary role in orchestrating the ability of mice to discriminate positive and negative affective states in others.
Cummings and Clem demonstrate that cue-related activation and plasticity of prefrontal interneurons cause disinhibition of a distributed brain network that underlies fear memory.
Bahl and Engert show that larval zebrafish can temporally integrate sensory information. The authors then use brain-wide functional imaging to search for, characterize and model brain areas that are well-suited to implement the underlying processes.
Cocaine-generated silent synapses dictate the encoding, consolidation, retrieval-induced destabilization and reconsolidation of cocaine memories, and these syapses can be targeted to reduce drug seeking and relapse.
Bonnen et al. find that representations of 3D motion in primate cortical neurons have an unexpected structure that is shaped by the projection of the world onto the retinae. They demonstrate a link between this structure and human perceptual errors.
Dragomir et al. use a new decision-making assay in larval zebrafish to show that fish modulate their behavior depending on stimulus strength. A whole-brain imaging functional screen reveals neurons that integrate sensory evidence over the course of seconds.
Lau et al. find that α-synuclein strains initiate distinct diseases when injected into mice, which provides a potential molecular explanation for the clinical and pathological differences between Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders.
Using samples from the Danish Neonatal Screening Biobank, children with ASD and children with ADHD were found to have similar, significantly increased rates of rare protein-truncating variants in evolutionarily constrained genes.
Animals compose behaviors from both sensory cues and internal states. Calhoun et al. develop an unsupervised modeling framework to identify the dynamic internal states that shape social interactions in Drosophila and use the model to identify neurons that modulate the male’s internal state.
This study shows that mouse prefrontal neurons differentially categorize social and nonsocial olfactory cues. Social cue representations are refined with experience and are disrupted in a mouse model of autism with elevated cortical noise.
The authors show that spatiotemporal spike sequences across neurons in the primate amygdala serve as a coding mechanism and might aid memory formation via the rehearsal of a recently experienced aversive or pleasant tone–odor association.
DNA sequencing of 3,864 individuals with ALS and 7,839 controls identified a novel disease gene, DNAJC7, which encodes a heat-shock protein. As DNAJC7 is an essential part of cell maintenance, mutations in DNAJC7 may lead to neurodegeneration.
Grubman et al. generated a single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the entorhinal cortex from patients with Alzheimer’s disease and identified transcription factor networks predicted to control disease progression in a cell-subtype-specific way.
Sankowski et al. have combined high-throughput techniques to characterize human microglia, identifying a spectrum of microglia phenotypes that are determined by localization, aging and glioblastoma.