Article
Cell Biology
Shovan Naskar, Jia Qi, Francisco Pereira, Charles R. Gerfen, Soohyun Lee
Summary: Extensive hierarchical yet highly reciprocal interactions among cortical areas are crucial for information processing, but the specificity and rules governing corticocortical connections are poorly understood. The study shows that long-range projections from different areas preferentially engage specific sets of GABAergic neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex, leading to distinct feedback mechanisms between neurons.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Xiaomeng Wang, Xiaotong Wu, Hao Wu, Hanyang Xiao, Sijia Hao, Bingwei Wang, Chen Li, Katherin Bleymehl, Stefan G. Kauschke, Volker Mack, Boris Ferger, Holger Klein, Ruimao Zheng, Shumin Duan, Hao Wang
Summary: Research has discovered that long-term activation of GABAergic cells in vlPAG can rescue obesity induced by high-fat diet. This treatment method reduces food intake, increases energy expenditure, and promotes browning of adipose tissue. Overexpression of CACNA2D1 gene can reverse obesity and is considered a potential target for obesity treatment.
Article
Neurosciences
Aniello Lombardi, Qiang Wang, Maik C. Stuettgen, Thomas Mittmann, Heiko J. Luhmann, Werner Kilb
Summary: This study investigates the role of short-term synaptic plasticity (STP) in excitatory and inhibitory synapses in the cortical layer 2/3 of mice. The results show that burst stimulation leads to short-term depression (STD) in both excitatory and inhibitory synapses, with stronger depression observed in inhibitory synapses and longer decay time.
FRONTIERS IN CELLULAR NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Jennifer Brown, Ian Anton Oldenburg, Gregory Telian, Sandon Griffin, Mieke Voges, Vedant Jain, Hillel Adesnik
Summary: Active haptic sensation is crucial for object identification, with animals needing to summate input from multiple whiskers specifically along the whisker arc. Cortical neurons across whiskers encode each orientation, and acute optogenetic manipulation reveals that infragranular layers alone are insufficient to solve the task.
Article
Neurosciences
Giulio Matteucci, Maelle Guyoton, Johannes M. Mayrhofer, Matthieu Auffret, Georgios Foustoukos, Carl C. H. Petersen, Sami El-Boustani
Summary: Behavioral states have an impact on the performance and learning of sensorimotor tasks, and this is related to altered neuronal sensory representations. In a study using water-restricted mice, it was found that cortical circuits and state-dependent sensory processing changes play a role in perceptual decision-making.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Omer Revah, Felicity Gore, Kevin W. Kelley, Jimena Andersen, Noriaki Sakai, Xiaoyu Chen, Min-Yin Li, Fikri Birey, Xiao Yang, Nay L. Saw, Samuel W. Baker, Neal D. Amin, Shravanti Kulkarni, Rachana Mudipalli, Bianxiao Cui, Seiji Nishino, Gerald A. Grant, Juliet K. Knowles, Mehrdad Shamloo, John R. Huguenard, Karl Deisseroth, Sergiu P. Pasca
Summary: This study demonstrates the potential of transplanting self-organizing neural organoids derived from human stem cells into the somatosensory cortex of rats to develop mature cell types and integrate into sensory and motivation-related circuits. The transplanted cortical neurons exhibit more complex properties than their in vitro counterparts and can drive reward-seeking behavior when optogenetically activated. This approach has the potential to detect circuit-level phenotypes in patient-derived cells that cannot be uncovered using other methods.
Article
Neurosciences
Bryan A. Copits, Raaj Gowrishankar, Patrick R. O'Neill, Jun-Nan Li, Kasey S. Girven, Judy J. Yoo, Xenia Meshik, Kyle E. Parker, Skylar M. Spangler, Abigail J. Elerding, Bobbie J. Brown, Sofia E. Shirley, Kelly K. L. Ma, Alexis M. Vasquez, M. Christine Stander, Vani Kalyanaraman, Sherri K. Vogt, Vijay K. Samineni, Tommaso Patriarchi, Lin Tian, N. Gautam, Roger K. Sunahara, Robert W. Gereau, Michael R. Bruchas
Summary: This study introduces a GPCR-based opsin called parapinopsin (PPO), which can rapidly and reversibly inhibit the release of glutamate, GABA, and dopamine at presynaptic terminals by coupling with G(i/o) signaling cascades. PPO alters reward behaviors in a time-locked and reversible manner in vivo, filling a significant gap in the neuroscience toolkit for rapid and reversible synaptic inhibition.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Camille Mazo, Antoine Nissant, Soham Saha, Enzo Peroni, Pierre-Marie Lledo, Gabriel Lepousez
Summary: In the olfactory system, a group of GABAergic neurons in the anterior olfactory cortex projects inhibitory feedback signals to the olfactory bulb, which can enhance the separation of odor responses and affect the discrimination of similar odors in the output neurons.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2022)
Article
Physics, Multidisciplinary
A. Sanzeni, M. H. Histed, N. Brunel
Summary: Cortical neurons exhibit irregular firing and a wide distribution of rates. The balanced state model explains this phenomenon as a cancellation of mean excitatory and inhibitory currents, which drive firing through fluctuations. However, in networks with conductance-based synapses, strong coupling suppresses current fluctuations, challenging the applicability of the balanced state idea to biological neural networks. We show that in networks of conductance-based neurons, asynchronous irregular activity and broad rate distributions can emerge with the appropriate synaptic efficacy.
Editorial Material
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Jing Zou, Samuel Andrew Hires
Summary: Recent research shows that inhibitory neurons expressing vasoactive intestinal polypeptide are specifically activated when rewards are anticipated, rather than when they are consumed.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
James B. Isbister, Vicente Reyes-Puerta, Jyh-Jang Sun, Illia Horenko, Heiko J. Luhmann
Summary: The study investigates how information is encoded in the nervous system through patterns of action potentials, specifically focusing on multi-neuron patterns of single spikes during stimulus-evoked responses. It is found that spike time patterns between neurons are influenced by trial-to-trial changes in shared excitability, leading to time-warped differences that explain the lack of fixed spike time patterns and noise correlations reported. Additionally, the study suggests the potential of spike time pattern modulation by population-wide trial-to-trial changes in excitability, introducing the concept of state-dependent coding and proposing an improved encoding capacity.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Vahid Esmaeili, Anastasiia Oryshchuk, Reza Asri, Keita Tamura, Georgios Foustoukos, Yanqi Liu, Romain Guiet, Sylvain Crochet, Carl C. H. Petersen
Summary: This study explores the changes in the activity of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the mouse sensorimotor cortex before and after learning a whisker detection task. The results indicate that the changes in whisker-evoked activity of these neurons differ in primary and secondary whisker motor cortices, but show similar patterns in primary and secondary orofacial motor cortices. These findings suggest that the balance of excitation and inhibition in local circuits, along with changes in long-range synaptic inputs, may contribute to the performance of delayed sensory-to-motor transformation.
Article
Neurosciences
Lauren Ryan, Maya Laughton, Andrew Sun-Yan, Samantha Costello, Ravi Pancholi, Simon Peron
Summary: The study reveals that even small volumes in the sensory cortex can influence perception of specific stimuli. The results showed that columnar-scale lesions can permanently degrade performance in object location discrimination tasks, while leaving vibrissal kinematics unaffected.
Article
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Qian Xiao, Xinyi Zhou, Pengfei Wei, Li Xie, Yaning Han, Jie Wang, Aoling Cai, Fuqiang Xu, Jie Tu, Liping Wang
Summary: Parvalbumin interneurons within the nucleus accumbens shell are crucial in modulating anxiety-like avoidance behavior, potentially via GABAergic pathways. Chronic stress increases the excitability of these neurons, leading to excessive maladaptive avoidance responses. The coordination between different types of neurons and GABAergic afferents plays a key role in regulating anxiety-related behaviors, providing a potential neurobiological basis for therapeutic interventions in pathological anxiety.
MOLECULAR PSYCHIATRY
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Moritoshi Hirono, Masanori Nakata
Summary: A study found that the appetite-stimulating peptide ghrelin enhances GABAergic transmission between neurons in the cerebellum, affecting its activity. This effect may be mediated by the GHS-R1a receptor and the TRPC1 and KCNQ ion channels.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)