Presidential Special Lecturers announced

The interface barrier between the brain surface and the adjacent meninges is important for regulating exchanges of fluid, protein and immune cells between the CNS and periphery. However, the cell types that form this important interface are not yet fully defined. To address this limitation, we used single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) and single cell spatial transcriptomics together with morphological lineage tracing and immunostaining to describe the cell types forming the interface barrier of the adult murine cortex. We show that the cortical interface is comprised of three major cell types, leptomeningeal cells, border astrocytes and tissue-resident macrophages. On the non-parenchymal side the interface is comprised of transcriptionally distinct PDGFRα-positive leptomeningeal cells that are intermingled with macrophages. This leptomeningeal layer is lined by a population of transcriptionally distinct border astrocytes. The interface neighborhood is rich in growth factor mRNAs, including many leptomeni...

Early childhood is a critical period showing experience-dependent changes in brain structure and function. The complex link between the structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) of the brain is of particular interest. However, its relationship with both age and attention in early childhood is not well understood. In this study, children between the ages of 4 and 7, and at a 1 year follow-up visit, underwent neuroimaging (diffusion-weighted and passive-viewing functional magnetic resonance imaging) and assessments for selective, sustained, and executive attention. We examined regional graph metrics and SC–FC coupling of the structural and functional networks. Partial least squares was used to investigate longitudinal brain measure changes and cross-sectional associations with age and attention. We observed longitudinal changes in functional graph metrics and age-related decreases in SC modularity. Region-wise graph analyses revealed variable brain–behavior relationships across the brain,...

The Society for Neuroscience is announcing the cancellation of Neuroscience 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in the Mayor of the District imposing continuing restrictions on large in-person events in the District of Columbia.

SfN member Yang Dan, PhD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of Neurobiology, University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the 2024 Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize for her ground-breaking research on elucidating the brain circuits that control behavior with a special emphasis on those neuronal networks that control sleep.

You could win $1,000 and a trip to Neuroscience 2017 in Washington, DC. Learn more »

Maturation of the cerebral cortex through adolescence supports cognitive, social, and emotional development. Disruptions of the brain’s normal growth curve, such as accelerated age-related cortical thinning, characterize several neuropsychiatric conditi...

See the full article on Neuronline.

Week of March 4, 2019: Read the Latest Advocacy and Science News

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) have the potential to restore hand grasping and object interaction to individuals with tetraplegia. Optimal grasping and object interaction require simultaneous production of both force and grasp outputs. However, since overlapping neural populations are modulated by both parameters, grasp type could affect how well forces are decoded from motor cortex in a closed-loop force iBCI. Therefore, this work quantified the neural representation and offline decoding performance of discrete hand grasps and force levels in two human participants with tetraplegia. Participants attempted to produce three discrete forces (light, medium, hard) using up to five hand grasp configurations. A two-way Welch ANOVA was implemented on multiunit neural features to assess their modulation to force and grasp . Demixed principal component analysis (dPCA) was used to assess for population-level tuning to force and grasp and to predict these parameters from neural activity. Three major ...