The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for ‘fight or flight’ responses and maintains homeostasis during daily activities such as exercise, eating a meal or regulation of body temperature. Sympathetic regulation of bodily functions requires the establishment and refinement of anatomically and functionally precise connections between postganglionic sympathetic neurons and peripheral organs distributed widely throughout the body. Mechanistic studies of key events in the formation of postg...
After establishing a novel operant conditioning paradigm that enables mice to report their interoceptive hunger state (fasted or sated), the authors investigated the hypothalamic neural circuitry that underpins these internal states using optogenetics and chemogenetics.
Last. Judy Illes(UBC: University of British Columbia)H-Index: 55
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When designing neurotechnologies to assist people with communication disabilities, neuroscientists and engineers must consider both the speaker’s perspective and the listeners’ ability to judge the voluntariness and accuracy of decoded communication. This is particularly important in personally significant communication contexts for which there are profound legal and societal implications.
A new study describes opposing cell-specific RhoA-dependent mechanisms linking the intrinsic regulation of neuronal microtubule dynamics and the extrinsic regulation of reactive astrocyte signalling that restrain axon regeneration.
#1Travis E. Faust(UMMS: University of Massachusetts Medical School)
#2Georgia Gunner(UMMS: University of Massachusetts Medical School)H-Index: 1
Last. Dorothy P. Schafer(UMMS: University of Massachusetts Medical School)H-Index: 22
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Almost 60 years have passed since the initial discovery by Hubel and Wiesel that changes in neuronal activity can elicit developmental rewiring of the central nervous system (CNS). Over this period, we have gained a more comprehensive picture of how both spontaneous neural activity and sensory experience-induced changes in neuronal activity guide CNS circuit development. Here we review activity-dependent synaptic pruning in the mammalian CNS, which we define as the removal of a subset of synapse...
Epidemiological sex differences in anxiety disorders and major depression are well characterized. Yet the circuits and mechanisms that contribute to these differences are understudied, because preclinical studies have historically excluded female rodents. This oversight is beginning to be addressed, and recent studies that include male and female rodents are identifying sex differences in neurobiological processes that underlie features of these disorders, including conflict anxiety, fear proces...
A central goal of neuroscience is to understand the representations formed by brain activity patterns and their connection to behaviour. The classic approach is to investigate how individual neurons encode stimuli and how their tuning determines the fidelity of the neural representation. Tuning analyses often use the Fisher information to characterize the sensitivity of neural responses to small changes of the stimulus. In recent decades, measurements of large populations of neurons have motivat...