Articles

Nano et al. introduce a pipeline to generate meta-atlases of the human brain from existing single-cell datasets and extract gene modules linked to cell fate specification. Perturbing these programs in human cortical chimeroids validated their roles in cell type specification.

Sznajder et al. identified a molecular link between autism and myotonic dystrophy, showing that a tandem repeat mutation in a single gene can disrupt splicing of multiple autism-related genes during brain development, leading to autism-like traits.

Animals alternate between active periods and periods of rest or sleep. This study in fruit flies points to brain metabolism as a cause for this and shows that a network of glial cells interacting with neurons links brain function with the need for rest and sleep.

GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. Using two-photon GABA imaging, Matsumoto et al. reveal over 40 GABA neuron types in the mouse retina, each uniquely filtering visual features.

Using two-photon imaging in awake bats, the authors show that the inferior colliculus encodes vocalization categories as categorical primitives—spatially clustered, category-selective neurons that enable early, efficient and structured processing that may support adaptive behavior.

Inactivation of the ventral subiculum does not change existing schema cells in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) but aids their formation during new learning. This challenges the idea that the OFC relies on the hippocampus and suggests that these regions work in parallel to process different aspects of cognitive maps.

This study uses single-cell sequencing to investigate the diversification of cortical cell types during evolution. Comparisons across brain regions and species identify molecular signatures of ancestral cell types in the mammalian olfactory cortex.

The authors uncover slow, facilitating inhibitory connections between serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe, refuting autoinhibition theories. This recurrence drives winner-take-all effects and nonlinear processing of threat-related inputs.

Through multiday imaging and acute whole-cell recordings in behaving mice, Qian, Li and Magee provide insight into place field formation in general and specifically how the hippocampus adaptively remaps for flexible goal-directed navigation.

Zhang et al. identify unimodal neural representations in the spinal cord of cutaneous mechanical and heat stimuli gated by a shared feed-forward local inhibitory neuron type and a neural transition during neuropathy, with increased excitatory drive.

The temporal order of events in working memory is thought to be reflected by ordered neuronal firing at different phases. Here the authors show that this is not the case and that phase order is linked to stimulus timing and oscillation frequency.

Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTSP induction follows patterned dynamics, is higher in new contexts and lower in CA3 than CA1.

The authors show that behavior and dopamine responses track prospective, but not retrospective, contingency. These results are explained by temporal difference (TD) learning models, indicating that TD errors are a measure of contingency.

Targeting the endothelium across ages and neurodegenerative diseases in 92 donors with single-cell inCITE-seq reveals similar alterations in ~40% of capillaries in AD, ALS and FTD. Endothelial TDP-43 loss coincides with increased nuclear p65/NF-κB activity and reduced Wnt/β-catenin.

Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of downstream decision making.

This postmortem study identifies brain-first and two body-first subtypes in prediagnostic cases of Lewy body disease. It highlights sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways in body-first disease, advancing insights on disease onset and progression.

Cholinergic interneurons act at nicotinic receptors to depress dopamine release, interrupting its relationship to dopamine neuron firing and supporting an inverse scaling of dopamine release according to cholinergic activity.

Cheng et al. identify a mitochondrial complex IV (CIV) deficiency in the brains of patients with sporadic amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They demonstrate that defects in mitochondrial CIV induce ALS-like phenotypes in rats and highlight CIV deficiency as a potential risk factor and therapeutic target for ALS.

How can the brain improve memory for an experience after it has occurred? Halpern et al. use intracranial EEG to show that, even while processing current experiences, people reactivate old ones and re-encode them, turning thoughts into memories.

During foraging with threat–reward conflicts in mice, dopamine modulates two competing neuron types in the striatum for flexible threat coping, from initial threat avoidance to eventual overcoming of the threat.