Transdifferentiation is a promising therapy for replacing dead neurons in spinal cord injury (SCI) where scar-forming reactive astrocytes proliferate robustly, allowing themselves as a prime target for reprogramming into neurons. In this study, we direc...

The increasingly interdisciplinary and global nature of neuroscience is reflected in both the research and the attendees at SfN’s annual meeting.

The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) will honor six researchers who have made significant contributions to the advancement of women in neuroscience. The awards will be presented during Neuroscience 2023, SfN's annual meeting.

Age-related cognitive decline particularly affects hippocampal function, being contextual learning, allocentric navigation and episodic memory severely compromised in old people. Adult hippocampal neurogenesis is a prime form of plasticity that allows t...

Identifying pathways for, and impacts of, SARS-CoV-2 infection of the brain

Language is a prime example of a domain where information is extracted according to statistical dependencies, and which has been shown to be preferentially consolidated during sleep. However, there is limited evidence supporting a link between oscillato...

Modulation of the α7 neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChRs) has become a prime target for the development of procognitive drugs aiming at counteracting deficits such as encountered in Schizophrenia or Alzheimer diseases. The finding of a sma...

The explore/exploit trade-off is a fundamental property of choice selection during reward-guided decision making, where the “same” choice can reflect either of these internal cognitive states. An unanswered question is whether the execution of a decision provides an underexplored measure of internal cognitive states. Touchscreens are increasingly used across species for cognitive testing and afford the ability to measure the precise location of choice touch responses. We examined how male and female mice in a restless bandit decision making task interacted with a touchscreen to determine if the explore/exploit trade-off, prior reward, and/or sex differences change the variability in the kinetics of touchscreen choices. During exploit states, successive touch responses are closer together than those made in an explore state, suggesting exploit states reflect periods of increased motor stereotypy. Although exploit decisions might be expected to be rewarded more frequently than explore decisions, we find that...

Activation of hypothalamic paraventricular oxytocin (OXTPVN) neurons by social or stress stimuli triggers OXT release to promote social investigation and buffer adverse effects of stress, respectively. Astrocytes, a type of glial cells, can bidirectionally interact with hypothalamic neurons to participate in local activity regulation within the paraventricular nucleus (PVN). It remains unknown whether contextual factors related to stimuli, as well as biological factors such as sex, influence OXTPVN neuronal or astrocyte activity and/or their interactions. To address this question, we performed dual-color fiber photometry in freely behaving male and female mice to simultaneously record Ca2+ dynamics in OXTPVN neurons and astrocytes during acute social (i.e., interactions with familiar vs. unfamiliar conspecifics) and stress (i.e., looming shadow) stimuli. During social stimuli, we observed the most pronounced Ca2+ changes in OXTPVN neurons in females, revealing sex and familiarity context specificity. No as...

Seizures affect a large proportion of the global population and occur due to abnormal neuronal activity in the brain. Unfortunately, widespread genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity contributes to insufficient treatment options. It is critical to identify the genetic underpinnings of how seizures occur to better understand seizure disorders and improve therapeutic development. We used the Drosophila melanogaster model to identify that IGF-II mRNA-binding protein (Imp) is linked to the onset of this phenotype. Specific reduction of Imp in neurons causes seizures after mechanical stimulation. Importantly, gross motor behavior is unaffected, showing Imp loss does not affect general neuronal activity. Developmental loss of Imp is sufficient to cause seizures in adults; thus, Imp-modulated neuron development affects mature neuronal function. Since Imp is an RNA-binding protein, we sought to identify the mRNA target that Imp regulates in neurons to ensure proper neuronal activity after mechanical stress. We find ...