A habit develops as a motivated behavior that is strengthened by extended experience and feedback. While the performance component of a habit is relatively well studied, being linked to action-related...

On 11 July 2026, neuroscience lost one of its most visionary scientists with the passing of Susumu Tonegawa at the age of 86. Across an extraordinary career spanning more than five decades, Tonegawa p...

Amygdala astrocyte primary cilia are disrupted during stress, and their restoration leads to improvements in stress-related behaviour in mice.

Proportion of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP)-positive terminals expresses synaptic or perisynaptic postsynaptic glutamate delta 1 (GluD1) immunoreactivity at symmetric and asymmetric synapses....

In this review, Sakers et al. discuss how astrocytes, microglia, and oligodendrocyte lineage cells actively regulate neural circuit formation, refinement, and stabilization. They propose that coordina...

In non-verbal communication, observers infer emotions from visible facial movements, yet emotional experiences are described in internal bodily terms (e.g., "my heart skipped a beat"). This contrast h...

Throughout the mammalian cortex, populations of neurons must work together to enact behaviors. While population recordings in motor cortex have revealed many aspects of when neurons fire during behavi...

Neuropsychopharmacology - Norepinephrine regulates hippocampal mitochondrial biogenesis via β2-adrenergic receptor signaling and PGC-1α

By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

Neuropsychopharmacology - Dorsal raphe nucleus enkephalin peptide modulates behavioral preference

Over six decades, Fields mapped out the circuits of both pain and addiction.

PDF | The RANDD function in Med-PC® IV is supposed to randomly select a value from a list, without replacement. By happenstance, we detected sequential... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

In the hippocampus, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

The rodent accessory olfactory system (AOS) detects chemosignals emitted by conspecifics and other species to support beneficial behaviors. Peripheral vomeronasal sensory neurons (VSNs), the AOS' chemical sensors, detect fecal bile acids in patterns that have unknown significance to the animal. We used a combination of mass spectrometry and VSN calcium imaging to investigate the AOS' capacity to use bile acid information to discriminate between fecal samples from captive reptiles and mice with varying gut microbiome states. Mass spectrometry analysis revealed bile acid patterns that distinguished biologically relevant samples from one another, representing theoretical discrimination axes. We measured VSN response patterns to bile acid stimuli aligned with theoretical discrimination axes. We found that VSNs perform stimulus "whitening" via an inverse relationship between natural bile acid abundance and population response magnitude. VSNs showed maximum sensitivity to taurine-conjugated bile acids, which have high theoretical discriminatory value, but were found at low natural abundance levels. Individual taurine-conjugated bile acids drove threat assessment behavior when added to familiar mouse fecal extracts, suggesting high behavioral significance. Finally, we analyzed the degree to which the AOS utilizes the theoretical information about species, diet, and gut microbiome status from bile acids. We found that VSN tuning patterns align with theoretical axes for discriminating reptilian predators from vegetarians, and between mice with different gut microbiome states. VSN tuning was especially well-aligned with the information available about conspecific gut microbiome status. These results show that AOS bile acid chemosensation supports discrimination of multiple biologically relevant states. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Institutes of Health, R01DC017985, R56DC015784, R01DC021213

Neuropsychopharmacology - Adolescent obesity induces sex-specific alterations of action control

Dopamine signals guide adaptive responses to reward- and threat-predictive cues, yet the mechanisms shaping these rapid dynamics remain unclear. Luján et al. identify midbrain endocannabinoid signalin...

Sharing positive and negative experiences at lab meetings can make a career in science a little less hard, a little more pleasant, and a little more human.

Traumatic experiences can result in heightened fear responses to trauma-associated stimuli. These symptoms can be difficult to extinguish, so identifying neuronal targets for facilitating fear extinction is critical. Many studies investigating fear learning in mice measure conditioned fear via freez …

Scientific Data - Dataset of cortical and subcortical single neuron activity during value-based tasks in macaque monkey

We mathematically prove that chemical reaction networks without hidden layers can solve tasks for which spiking neural networks require hidden layers. Our proof uses the deterministic mass-action kine...