Development of the nervous system articles within Nature

Featured

  • News Feature |

    Much of our neural circuitry is fixed during childhood. Researchers are finding ways to unglue it, raising hopes for treating many brain disorders.

    • Jon Bardin

  • News & Views |

    Several genes were duplicated during human evolution. It seems that one such duplication gave rise to a gene that may have helped to make human brains bigger and more adaptable than those of our ancestors.

    • Daniel H. Geschwind
    •  & Genevieve Konopka

  • News & Views |

    Two studies show how electrical coupling between sister neurons in the developing cerebral cortex might help them to link up into columnar microcircuits that process related sensory information. See Letters p.113 & p.118

    • Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel
    •  & Tobias Bonhoeffer

  • News Feature |

    Once thought to be passive sentinels, microglia now seem to be crucial for pruning back neurons during development.

    • Virginia Hughes

  • News & Views |

    An ingenious technique allows the monitoring of brain-wide patterns of neuronal activity in a vertebrate at the cellular level, while the animal interacts with a virtual environment. See Article p.471

    • Joseph R. Fetcho

  • Letter |

    Neurotransmitter release and activity are modulated in the striatum of mice to demonstrate that the balance of activity within the two antagonistic, inhibitory pathways co-mingled in this nucleus regulates excitatory innervation of the basal ganglia during development.

    • Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy
    • , Arpiar Saunders
    •  & Bernardo L. Sabatini

  • News |

    Neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells can control native neurons in mice.

    • Charlotte Schubert

  • News & Views |

    Grid cells confer a spatial impression of an animal's environment on the brain. Their firing patterns in a cave-dwelling bat reopen old questions about how they do this, and pose some compelling new ones. See Letter p.103

    • Laura Lee Colgin

  • News |

    In times of starvation the placenta protects the fetus from brain dysfunction.

    • Zoë Corbyn

  • News |

    Researchers have worked out how to reprogram cells from human skin into functioning nerve cells.

    • Ewen Callaway

  • News & Views |

    A study in rats suggests that individual neurons take a nap when the brain is forced to stay awake, and that the basic unit of sleep is the electrical activity of single cortical neurons. See Article p.443

    • Christopher S. Colwell

  • Letter |

    In a zebrafish model of melanoma driven by activated BRAF, this study finds expression of a gene signature indicative of disrupted terminal differentiation of neural crest progenitors. A chemical screen led to the identification of leflunomide as an inhibitor of neural crest stem cells. Leflunomide inhibits dihydroorotate dehydrogenase and thereby transcriptional elongation, including genes involved in neural crest development and melanoma growth. Leflunomide has anti-melanoma activity in the zebrafish model and human melanoma xenografts, and might prove useful as an anticancer drug.

    • Richard Mark White
    • , Jennifer Cech
    •  & Leonard I. Zon

  • Letter |

    Little is known about how nutritional cues are detected by quiescent neural stem cells (neuroblasts in Drosophila melanogaster) and how these signals are relayed to reactivate their cell cycle to exit quiescence. This study uses an integrative physiology approach to identify the relay mechanism regulating this nutritional checkpoint in neural progenitors. It is found that specific insulin-like peptides produced within the brain by glia bridge the amino-acid/TOR-dependent signal derived from the fat body with PI3K/TOR signalling in neuroblasts to induce exit from quiescent.

    • Rita Sousa-Nunes
    • , Lih Ling Yee
    •  & Alex P. Gould

  • Letter |

    A common stem cell is known to produce both neural plate and mesoderm, but the factors regulating this choice are unknown. This study determines that Tbx6-dependent modulation of the developmental transcription factor Sox2 drives the fate of axial stem cells. In the absence of Tbx6, cells aberrantly upregulated Sox2 activity, with the result that cells originally destined to be mesoderm turned into ectopic neural tubes. In the absence of the N1 enhancer, this aberrant regulation is corrected and cells follow the appropriate fate, even in the absence of Tbx6. Therefore, active repression of the neural fate program is essential for mesoderm tissue to develop from axial stem cells.

    • Tatsuya Takemoto
    • , Masanori Uchikawa
    •  & Hisato Kondoh

  • News & Views |

    How is light perceived? The answer that might immediately come to mind is, through the eyes. Fly larvae, however, can 'feel' light using specialized neurons embedded under the cuticle encasing their bodies. See Article p.921

    • Paul A. Garrity

  • Letter |

    In the retina, highly selective wiring from inhibitory cells contributes to determine the direction-selection characteristics of an individual ganglion cell, yet how the asymmetric wiring inherent to these connections is established was unknown. Here, two independent studies using complementary techniques, including pharmacology, electrophysiology and optogenetics, find that although inhibitory inputs to both sides of the direction-selective cell are uniform early in development, by the second postnatal week, inhibitory synapses on the null side strengthen whereas those on the preferred side remain constant. These plasticity changes occur independent of neural activity, indicating that a specific developmental program is executed to produce the direction-selective circuitry in the retina.

    • Wei Wei
    • , Aaron M. Hamby
    •  & Marla B. Feller

  • News & Views |

    As in humans, the actions and reactions of male and female fruitflies during courtship are quite distinct. The differences seem to lie in gender-specific neural interpretations of the same sensory signals. See Letter p.686

    • Richard Benton

  • Article |

    In cells, WAVE protein, a central regulator of actin dynamics during cell motility, is constitutively incorporated into WAVE regulatory complex (WRC), is normally present in an inactive state and can be activated by a number of inputs. These authors present the structure and mechanistic analysis of WRC. The combined data reveal how the WAVE protein is inhibited within the WRC complex and provide mechanisms for WRC activation at the plasma membrane.

    • Zhucheng Chen
    • , Dominika Borek
    •  & Michael K. Rosen

  • News & Views |

    Mobile DNA sequences called L1 contribute to the brain's genetic heterogeneity and may affect neuron function. The protein MeCP2, which is mutated in Rett syndrome, seems to regulate the activity of these genomic elements. See Letter p.443

    • Lorenz Studer

  • Introduction |

    • Tanguy Chouard
    •  & Noah Gray

  • Letter |

    Ramón y Cajal, the founding father of neuroscience, observed similarities between the vertebrate retina and the insect eye, but that was based purely on anatomy. Using state-of-the-art genetics and electrophysiology in the fruitfly, these authors distinguish motion-sensitive neurons responding to abrupt increases in light from those specific to light decrements, thus bringing the similarity with vertebrate circuitry to the functional level.

    • Maximilian Joesch
    • , Bettina Schnell
    •  & Alexander Borst

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