Nature Biotechnology - Targeting the affective dimension of pain

Researchers identify the neurons involved in the emotional distress associated with pain, and design a genetic approach that could soothe suffering without opioid drugs.

The anterior cingulate cortex encodes affective pain behaviours modulated by opioids; targeting opioid-sensitive neurons through a new chemogenetic gene therapy replicates the analgesic effects of mor...

Mason helped define the rodent prosocial behavior field, but now she’s changing course.

Neuropsychopharmacology - Central amygdalar PKCδ neurons mediate fentanyl withdrawal

Ogg et al. use in vivo imaging techniques to record activity in the locus coeruleus (LC) and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) during a reversal learning task in freely moving rodents. They show that man...

or technically, Psilocybin-enhanced fear extinction linked to bidirectional modulation of cortical ensembles [See original abstract on Pubmed]

In 2025, the words we use to describe emotions matter, but their definitions are controversial. Here, I unpack the different positions in this space and the rationales behind them—and I invite 13…

The Department of Research and Development at the Division of Emergencies and Critical Care, Oslo University Hospital in collaboration with Leknes Affective Brain lab (www.affectivebrains.com) and the...

A nociceptive basolateral amygdala–to–nucleus accumbens shell circuit contributes to pain unpleasantness in chronic pain.

Tools to simultaneously trace multiple neuronal projections and/or profile projection neurons for multi-modal investigations are lacking. Here authors introduce Projection-TAGs, a retrograde AAV platf...

The rodent brain contains 70,000,000+ neurons interconnected via complex axonal circuits with varying architectures. Neural pathologies are often associated with anatomical changes in these axonal pro...