Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of July 7, 2017.

The organization of brain function is often pictured as a simple pyramid, with each sensory modality represented separately at the first level but coming together in “higher” cortical areas to become a unified percept. However, a growing body of work reveals direct and early interactions between

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The daily activity of rodents includes visiting several distinct bait areas in their territories. Before starting such a journey, they need to decide a pertinent goal location from the others. Previous research has identified neurons in the hippocampus ...

The environment experienced by children, such as exposure to chronic early life adversity (ELA), increases lifespan brain disorder risk. The mechanisms that link ELA exposure to functional brain disruptions are not well understood. A limited-bedding and nesting paradigm, in which ELA is induced in mouse pups over the first postnatal week through disruption of maternal care, is characterized by limited resources, environment unpredictability, and disruption of reward and cognitive behaviors. Studies using this model demonstrated sex-selective alterations in hippocampal mitochondrial-associated proteins in response to ELA compared with care as usual (CAU). Further, oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) capacity and complex I activity are increased in ELA juveniles, yet decreased in adults, with the impact of ELA moderated by sex in adults. Given that altered mitochondrial function is a key mediator in metabolic adaptations, the goal of the present study was to evaluate the possibility of reversing mitochondrial...

Sleep–wake states bidirectionally interact with epilepsy and seizures, but the mechanisms are unknown. A barrier to comprehensive characterization and the study of mechanisms has been the difficulty of annotating large chronic recording datasets. To overcome this barrier, we sought to develop an automated method of classifying sleep–wake states, seizures, and the postictal state in mice ranging from controls to mice with severe epilepsy with accompanying background electroencephalographic (EEG) abnormalities. We utilized a large dataset of recordings, including electromyogram, EEG, and hippocampal local field potentials, from control and intra-amygdala kainic acid-treated mice. We found that an existing sleep–wake classifier performed poorly, even after retraining. A support vector machine, relying on typically used scoring parameters, also performed below our benchmark. We then trained and evaluated several multilayer neural network architectures and found that a bidirectional long short-term memory–based...

The Jennifer N. Bourne Prize in Neuronal and Synaptic Structure and Function, funded by Kristen M. Harris, recognizes a scientist for outstanding work that advances our understanding of synapses in neural circuits and connectomics at the nanometer scale.

Exposure to early life stress (ELS) can exert long-lasting impacts on emotional regulation. The corticolimbic system including the basolateral amygdala (BLA), ventral hippocampus (vHIP), and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a key role in fear learning. Using the limited bedding paradigm (LB), we examined the functional consequences of ELS on excitatory and inhibitory tone in the prelimbic (PL) mPFC after fear conditioning in rats. In adults, LB exposure enhanced in vivo glutamate release in the PL mPFC during fear conditioning in male, but not female offspring. In contrast, the glutamate response to fear conditioning was diminished in LB-exposed pre-adolescent males, but not females. We investigated whether reduced glutamatergic inputs and/or elevated inhibitory tone might contribute to the diminished glutamate response in the mPFC following LB in pre-adolescent male rats. Indeed, we found that LB exposure specifically increased the activation of PV, but not SST interneurons in layer V, but not la...