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A study in mice helps to resolve a debate surrounding striatal DA dynamics and reward benefit or cost and also reveals motivation and transient striatal DA release have a bidirectional causal relationship.
Around 10% of individuals with frontotemporal lobar dementia have amyloid filament inclusions that lack tau and TDP-43 and were thought to contain the protein FUS, but are found instead to contain the FUS homologue TAF15.
Cytoplasmic mislocalization of TDP-43 in neurodegenerative disease affects mRNA maturation and protein levels of stathmin-2, leading to a reduction in axon diameter and tearing of outer myelin layers and thereby disrupting neuronal function.
A mark test of self-recognition in mice reveals that self-responding ventral CA1 neurons underlie mirror-induced self-directed behaviour and are shaped by social experience with conspecifics.
‘Mechanism’ is a frequently used causal concept in neuroscience but can have different meanings that are often not specified. In this Review, Ross and Bassett explore these different meanings and the challenges associated with the variable usage of this term before discussing how these challenges may be met.
Within the CNS, APOE4 — a risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer disease — is produced by a variety of cell types. Blumenfeld, Yip, Kim and Huang discuss recent scientific advances that have begun to unravel the cell type-specific roles of APOE4 and outline a corresponding cell type-specific APOE4 cascade model of Alzheimer disease.
Data-driven disease progression models are computational tools that infer long-term disease timelines from short-term biomarker data and may provide insights into disease processes. In this Review, Young, Oxtoby et al. provide an overview of such models, with a focus on how they have been used in the context of neurodegenerative diseases, notably Alzheimer disease.
Synaptic engineering involves the synthetic insertion of new synapses between neurons in vivo. In this Perspective, Rabinowitch, Colón-Ramos and Krieg explore this emerging approach for studying neural circuits, describing the different methods that have been used and how they have been implemented.