Neural circuits articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    The transmembrane protein teneurin-3 is expressed in multiple topographically interconnected areas of the hippocampal region and acts in both projection and target neurons to control wiring specificity from CA1 to the subiculum.

    • Dominic S. Berns
    • , Laura A. DeNardo
    •  & Liqun Luo

  • Article |

    Speed and gait selection in mice are controlled by glutamatergic excitatory neurons in the cuneiform nucleus and the pedunculopontine nucleus, which act in conjunction to select context-dependent locomotor behaviours.

    • V. Caggiano
    • , R. Leiras
    •  & O. Kiehn

  • Letter |

    The discovery of a visual-looming-sensitive neuron, LPLC2, that provides input to the Drosophila escape pathway, and uses dendrites patterned to integrate directionally selective inputs to selectively encode outward motion.

    • Nathan C. Klapoetke
    • , Aljoscha Nern
    •  & Gwyneth M. Card

  • Article |

    Path-length-dependent axonal synapse sorting of local presynaptic axons of excitatory neurons in the rat medial entorhinal cortex results in sequential targeting of inhibitory and excitatory neurons, which are connected by a cellular feedforward inhibition circuit.

    • Helene Schmidt
    • , Anjali Gour
    •  & Moritz Helmstaedter

  • Letter |

    Calcium imaging data from mice performing a virtual reality auditory decision-making task are used to analyse the population codes in primary auditory and posterior parietal cortex that support choice behaviour.

    • Caroline A. Runyan
    • , Eugenio Piasini
    •  & Christopher D. Harvey

  • Article |

    A combination of microprism-based cellular imaging to monitor insular cortex visual cue responses in behaving mice across hunger states with circuit mapping and manipulations reveals a neural basis for state-specific biased processing of motivationally relevant cues.

    • Yoav Livneh
    • , Rohan N. Ramesh
    •  & Mark L. Andermann

  • Article |

    Thalamic neurons show selective persistent activity that predicts movement direction, and their photoinhibition decreases activity in the anterior lateral motor cortex, and vice versa, suggesting that persistent activity requires reciprocal excitation in a thalamocortical loop.

    • Zengcai V. Guo
    • , Hidehiko K. Inagaki
    •  & Karel Svoboda

  • Letter |

    Depending on prediction accuracy at the time of memory recall, specific mushroom body output neurons drive different combinations of dopaminergic neurons to extinguish or reconsolidate appetitive memory in Drosophila.

    • Johannes Felsenberg
    • , Oliver Barnstedt
    •  & Scott Waddell

  • Letter |

    A sizable fraction of granule cells convey information about the expectation of reward, with different populations responding to reward delivery, anticipation and omission, with some responses evolving over time with learning.

    • Mark J. Wagner
    • , Tony Hyun Kim
    •  & Liqun Luo

  • Review Article |

    Weber and Dan review our understanding of the neural circuits controlling sleep, focusing on the advances in measurement and manipulation of neuronal activity and circuit tracing from genetically defined cell types.

    • Franz Weber
    •  & Yang Dan

  • Letter |

    A mouse study reveals that acetylcholine signalling networks have a role in the regulation of body weight homeostasis, with increased activity of cholinergic neurons decreasing food consumption through downstream hypothalamic targets.

    • Alexander M. Herman
    • , Joshua Ortiz-Guzman
    •  & Benjamin R. Arenkiel

  • Letter |

    In mice, glutamatergic globus pallidus neurons projecting to the lateral habenula (GPh neurons) bi-directionally encode positive and negative prediction error signals that are critical for outcome evaluation and are driven by a subset of basal ganglia circuits.

    • Marcus Stephenson-Jones
    • , Kai Yu
    •  & Bo Li

  • Letter |

    A brain circuit is identified through which serotonin induces an anxiety-like state; this circuit also mediates the anxiety-like behaviour induced by acute administration of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine and may underlie the early adverse events that some patients with anxiety disorders have to these types of drugs.

    • Catherine A. Marcinkiewcz
    • , Christopher M. Mazzone
    •  & Thomas L. Kash

  • Letter |

    Feedback from the oral cavity to thirst-promoting neurons in the subfornical organ (SFO) during eating and drinking is integrated with information about blood composition, providing a prediction of how oral consumption will affect fluid balance and leading to changes in behaviour.

    • Christopher A. Zimmerman
    • , Yen-Chu Lin
    •  & Zachary A. Knight

  • Letter |

    A novel rhythmogenic brainstem network was discovered in mice that is necessary and sufficient for generating postinspiration, a breathing phase also used for swallowing, coughing and vocalization.

    • Tatiana M. Anderson
    • , Alfredo J. Garcia
    •  & Jan-Marino Ramirez

  • Article |

    Directional selectivity in the detection of moving visual stimuli critically depends on starburst amacrine cells, which have been studied primarily in rabbit retina; a large-scale reconstruction of the mouse retina at a single-synapse level, along with experimental and theoretical analysis, shows that mouse retinal circuitry is adapted to the smaller eye size of mice.

    • Huayu Ding
    • , Robert G. Smith
    •  & Kevin L. Briggman

  • Article |

    A combination of optogenetic, electrophysiological and neuroanatomical tracing methods defines midbrain periaqueductal grey circuits for specific defensive behaviours.

    • Philip Tovote
    • , Maria Soledad Esposito
    •  & Andreas Lüthi

  • Letter |

    Two-photon calcium imaging and electron microscopy were used to explore the relationship between structure and function in mouse primary visual cortex, showing that layer 2/3 neurons are connected in subnetworks, that pyramidal neurons with similar orientation selectivity preferentially form synapses with each other, and that neurons with similar orientation tuning form larger synapses; this study exemplifies functional connectomics as a powerful method for studying the organizational logic of cortical networks.

    • Wei-Chung Allen Lee
    • , Vincent Bonin
    •  & R. Clay Reid

  • Article |

    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.

    • Michael F. Wells
    • , Ralf D. Wimmer
    •  & Michael M. Halassa

  • Letter |

    Igf1 is identified in mice as an experience-induced gene that functions cell-autonomously to increase inhibitory input onto a disinhibitory subtype of GABAergic neurons in the cortex, affecting the downstream excitation–inhibition balance within circuits that regulate visual acuity, and providing a novel example of experience modulating neural plasticity.

    • A. R. Mardinly
    • , I. Spiegel
    •  & M. E. Greenberg

  • Article |

    The peptidergic neuronal circuit controlling sigh generation has been identified as ~200 Nmb- or Grp-expressing neurons in the RTN/pFRG breathing control centre of the medulla that project to ~200 receptor-expressing neurons in the respiratory rhythm generator, the preBötzinger Complex.

    • Peng Li
    • , Wiktor A. Janczewski
    •  & Jack L. Feldman

  • Article |

    Transient manipulation of neural activity is widely used to probe the function of specific circuits, yet such targeted perturbations could also have indirect effects on downstream circuits that implement separate and independent functions; a study to test this reveals that transient perturbations of specific circuits in mammals and songbirds severely impair learned skills that recover spontaneously after permanent lesions of the same brain areas.

    • Timothy M. Otchy
    • , Steffen B. E. Wolff
    •  & Bence P. Ölveczky

  • Article |

    Neural sequences recorded from the vocal premotor area HVC in juvenile birds learning song ‘syllables’ show ‘prototype’ syllables forming early, with multiple new highly divergent neural sequences emerging from this precursor syllable as learning progresses.

    • Tatsuo S. Okubo
    • , Emily L. Mackevicius
    •  & Michale S. Fee

  • 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

  • Article |

    In the worm C. elegans, a previously unidentified pair of bilateral neurons in the male (termed MCMs) are shown to arise from differentiated glial cells upon sexual maturation; these neurons are essential for a male-specific form of associative learning which balances chemotactic responses with reproductive priorities.

    • Michele Sammut
    • , Steven J. Cook
    •  & Arantza Barrios

  • Letter |

    To better understand the relationship between input and output connectivity for neurons of interest in specific brain regions, a viral-genetic tracing approach is used to identify input based on a combination of neurons’ projection and cell type, as illustrated in a study of locus coeruleus noradrenaline neurons.

    • Lindsay A. Schwarz
    • , Kazunari Miyamichi
    •  & Liqun Luo

  • Letter |

    A transistor-free metal-oxide memristor crossbar with low device variability is realised and trained to perform a simple classification task, opening the way to integrated neuromorphic networks of a complexity comparable to that of the human brain, with high operational speed and manageable power dissipation.

    • M. Prezioso
    • , F. Merrikh-Bayat
    •  & D. B. Strukov

  • Letter |

    Anatomical and functional analyses reveal the existence of two types of globus pallidus externus neurons that directly control cortex, suggesting a pathway by which dopaminergic drugs used to treat neuropsychiatric disorders may act in the basal ganglia to modulate cortex.

    • Arpiar Saunders
    • , Ian A. Oldenburg
    •  & Bernardo L. Sabatini

  • Letter |

    This study identifies distinct classes of neurons in the fly brain, which respond to external cooling, warming, or both, and contribute to behavioural response; the results illustrate how higher brain centres extract a stimulus’ quality, intensity and timing from a simple temperature map at the periphery.

    • Dominic D. Frank
    • , Genevieve C. Jouandet
    •  & Marco Gallio

  • Letter |

    Neuronal grid cells fire in a spatial grid pattern laid out across the surface of a familiar environment, however the role of environmental boundaries in the construction of this pattern is not well understood; this study shows that the grid pattern orients to the walls of polarized environments such as squares but not circles and that the hexagonal grid symmetry is permanently broken in highly polarized environments such as trapezoids.

    • Julija Krupic
    • , Marius Bauza
    •  & John O’Keefe

  • Article |

    This study tracks dragonfly head and body movements during high-velocity and high-precision prey-capture flights, and shows that the dragonfly uses predictive internal models and reactive control to build an interception trajectory that complies with biomechanical constraints.

    • Matteo Mischiati
    • , Huai-Ti Lin
    •  & Anthony Leonardo

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