Author name: Jami L. Milton

It’s our final must-read list for 2017! These are the papers published in December that stood out as relevant to the community of neuroscientists studying neural circuits. Happy New Year! 1. Combined Social and Spatial Coding in a Descending Projection from the Prefrontal Cortex by Malavika Murugan, Hee Jae Jang, Michelle Park, Ellia M. Miller,

Do you stress eat? Based on biology, it’s no wonder our emotions are so tightly linked to feeding. Imagine when we foraged for food away from shelter and into potentially dangerous territories. Feeding has evolved to be tightly linked to our emotions, and the biological systems that control feeding also regulate responses to stressful situations.

Every month we pool together some of the most read-worthy papers in neural circuits, and for the month of November, we have another impressive list. Please have a look, and as always, your feedback on these studies or others that didn’t make our list but make yours are welcome! (As it were, Neuron published today

October brought with it cooler air and many more amazing neural circuit papers! Three of the papers on our must-read list used Inscopix nVista technology in freely behaving mice. We scour the journals and put links here for your convenience. Enjoy! 1. Parvalbumin and Somatostatin Interneurons Control Different Space-Coding Networks in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex

How do our brains represent the most basic of social cues, like whether a member of our species is male or female? This is a question two labs have been asking in mice, and they’ve employed some ground-breaking methods to do so. One lab, the Anderson lab from Caltech, published their results on October 19th

“I think we ought to integrate the maps of the brain, the dynamics of the brain, and the ability to control the brain into single coherent datasets” ~ Ed Boyden, MIT Near the end of 2015, Dr. Ed Boyden of MIT Media lab, McGovern Institute, and Synthetic Neurobiology Group, was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in

A mouse’s ability to differentiate male mice from female mice results from neural circuits that are hardwired in the hypothalamus of the brain, or at least that’s what neuroscientists thought. Because the hypothalamus is an evolutionarily ancient structure, and is also involved in instinctive behaviors like feeding, mating and aggression are considered innate behaviors in

September went by way too quickly, but at least there was plenty of great neural circuit research published in September to read. Congrats to all the authors! There are very interesting papers on social behavior and female aggression, and on dopamine neurons in disease and locomotion, plus many others! 1. Gating of social reward by

Sitting in a movie theater, we eat buttered popcorn from a bag with eyes fixed on the giant screen in front of us. Our hands move from bag to mouth without much conscious thought about the brain processes at work. Somehow, motor cortical areas in the brain coordinate movements of muscles while we remain engrossed

About ten years ago a group of neuroscientists led by Professor Ed Callaway realized they would soon be able to label all the presynaptic inputs to an individual neuron by using a modified rabies virus. The ability to map neural circuits and the direct synaptic inputs to individual neurons was unprecedented at the time and

For August, we selected 10 papers that cover the circuit mechanisms involved in a full spectrum of behaviors, including feeding, moving, sleeping, socializing, remembering, and scratching an itch. Most of the studies listed below record and manipulate activity in specific neuronal populations in freely moving mice. Three of the studies apply the Inscopix nVista system