A year ago I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Neuroscience and began my tenure by writing an editorial entitled, “[A Commitment to Communication][1].” In that editorial I outlined a number of plans for new initiatives agreed upon by the editorial board, along with my promise

Read the five JNeurosci research papers published in June 2019 that generated the most online discussion, as measured by Altmetric.

During SfN’s 12th annual Capitol Hill Day, advocates representing 25 states and six countries held 93 Congressional meetings.

Populations of hippocampal neurons were recorded simultaneously in rats shuttling on a track between a fixed reward site at one end and a movable reward site, mounted in a sliding box, at the opposite end. While the rat ran toward the fixed site, the box was moved. The rat returned to the box in its new position. On the initial part of all journeys, cells fired at fixed distances from the origin, whereas on the final part, cells fired at fixed distances from the destination. Thus, on outward journeys from the box, with the box behind the rat, the position representation must have been updated by path integration. Farther along the journey, the place field map became aligned on the basis of external stimuli. The spatial representation was quantified in terms of population vectors. During shortened journeys, the vector shifted from an alignment with the origin to an alignment with the destination. The dynamics depended on the degree of mismatch with respect to the full-length journey. For small mismatches, t...

Whether hippocampal map realignment is coupled more strongly to position or time was studied in rats trained to shuttle on a linear track. The rats were required to run from a start box and to pause at a goal location at a fixed location relative to stable distal cues (room-aligned coordinate frame). The origin of each lap was varied by shifting the start box and track as a unit (box-aligned coordinate frame) along the direction of travel. As observed by [Gothard et al. (1996a)][1], on each lap the hippocampal activity realigned from a representation that was box-aligned to one that was room-aligned. We studied the dynamics of this transition using a measure of how well the moment-by-moment ensemble activity matched the expected activity given the location of the animal in each coordinate frame. The coherency ratio, defined as the ratio of the matches for the two coordinate systems, provides a quantitative measure of the ensemble activity alignment and was used to compare four possible descriptions of the ...

It has been suggested that the strongest initial determinant of rat place-cell firing is internally-generated information about the rat’s motion relative to a known starting point, and that experience in an environment is required for cues and landmarks to gain control over place-cell firing. This associative binding of cues to an ensemble of hippocampal neurons (a ‘map’) may involve LTP. Because LTP is impaired in aged rats, cues should be poorly bound to their hippocampal maps. To test this prediction, aged and adult rats were trained on a linear track task with a mobile start box (c.f. Gothard et al., 1996) in which self-motion and visual-cue information are mismatched across trials. Self-motion controls place-cell firing during the initial portion of each journey, then the hippocampal map realigns so that visual cues control place-cell firing during the latter portion of the journey. As predicted, this realignment was delayed in aged rats, occurring nearer to the end of the track. Moreover, the realign...

AAAS CEO Rush Holt discusses how the global scientific community can collaborate to advance the scientific enterprise.

X-linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism (XDP) is an inherited, X-linked, adult-onset movement disorder characterized by degeneration in the neostriatum. No therapeutics alter disease progression. The mechanisms underlying regional differences in degeneration and adult onset are unknown. Developing therapeutics requires a deeper understanding of how XDP-relevant features vary in health and disease. XDP is possibly due, in part, to a partial loss of TAF1 function. A disease-specific SINE-VNTR-Alu (SVA) retrotransposon insertion occurs within intron 32 of TAF1 , a subunit of TFIID involved in transcription initiation. While all XDP males are usually clinically affected, females are heterozygous carriers generally not manifesting the full syndrome. As a resource for disease modeling, we characterized eight iPSC lines from three XDP female carrier individuals for X chromosome inactivation status and identified clonal lines that express either the wild-type X or XDP haplotype. Furthermore, we characterized XDP-relevant t...

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Functional neuroimaging studies have repeatedly demonstrated widespread neural activation in response to adminstration of noxious stimuli. Many of these brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, are not part of the presumed functional anatomy of pain perception. In this study we designed an experimental paradigm to test the hypothesis that some brain regions are activated during pain administration because they support the cognitive processes involved in the evaluation of the painful stimulus. To date six subjects have completed this 3T fMRI event-related imaging study that is approved by the MGH IRB. The data has been analyzed with SPM 2B using a random effects model. Preliminary analysis of the first half of the planned cohort has been performed and the results confirm our hypothesis. Using the contrast between stimulus trials that required subjects to rate the intensity of the stimulus as compared to trials in which they performed a matched target detection task, significantly increased B...