Central nervous system articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    A study provides evidence for a shared lymphatic circuit that connects the posterior eye and the brain, allowing the generation of immune responses to protect the CNS against pathogens and tumours following intravitreal immunization.

    • Xiangyun Yin
    • , Sophia Zhang
    •  & Eric Song

  • Outlook |

    An estimated 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy. But research funding is low, treatment can fail and the mechanisms of the disease are a mystery. By Neil Savage.

    • Neil Savage

  • Outlook |

    Wearable devices that monitor seizures promise improvements in epilepsy treatments and research.

    • Elie Dolgin

  • Outlook |

    Plagued by a history of fear and stigma, epilepsy has languished when it comes to research funding.

    • Lauren Gravitz

  • Outlook |

    The development of effective antiepilepsy drugs is moving on from trial-and-error approaches to sophisticated molecular solutions.

    • Megan Cully

  • Outlook |

    Not enough doctors and patients opt for surgery to treat epilepsy, despite clinical evidence of the benefits, says Samuel Wiebe.

    • Samuel Wiebe

  • Outlook |

    For children with epilepsy whose condition is resistant to medication, a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet may help bring their seizures under control.

    • Rachel Brazil

  • Outlook |

    Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders to affect the human brain. Many genetic aspects of the disease have been identified, but mechanisms remains elusive.

    • Charvy Narain

  • Outlook |

    Epilepsy arises from natural mechanisms in the brain that go awry. Researchers are trying to unravel its complexities.

    • Michael Eisenstein

  • News Feature |

    Asking parents to donate a child's brain to research is emotionally fraught. Some researchers say that it is time to put aside the taboos.

    • Alison Abbott

  • News & Views |

    A study in rats suggests that individual neurons take a nap when the brain is forced to stay awake, and that the basic unit of sleep is the electrical activity of single cortical neurons. See Article p.443

    • Christopher S. Colwell

  • Books & Arts |

    Two books reach opposite verdicts on how the Internet affects us, find Daphne Bavelier and C. Shawn Green

    • Daphne Bavelier
    •  & C. Shawn Green

  • News Feature |

    Japanese hospitals are using near-infrared imaging to help diagnose psychiatric disorders. But critics are not sure the technique is ready for the clinic.

    • David Cyranoski

  • Letter |

    The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is made up of vascular endothelial cells and was thought to have formed postnatally from astrocytes. Two independent studies demonstrate that this barrier forms during embryogenesis, with pericyte/endothelial cell interactions being critical to regulate the BBB during development. A better understanding of the relationship among pericytes, neuroendothelial cells and astrocytes in BBB function will contribute to our understanding of BBB breakdown during central nervous system injury and disease.

    • Richard Daneman
    • , Lu Zhou
    •  & Ben A. Barres

  • Letter |

    Anxious temperament in both humans and monkeys is an important early predictor of psychopathology and is known to be heritable. These authors characterize the neural circuitry associated with this trait and the extent to which its function is heritable. A scan of related monkeys after exposure to mild stress showed that activation in both the amygdala and hippocampus was predictive of anxious temperament, but that heritability of activity in hippocampus was greater than that in amygdala.

    • Jonathan A. Oler
    • , Andrew S. Fox
    •  & Ned H. Kalin

  • Article |

    The appropriate initiation and termination of behavioural action sequences is imperative, but the neural mechanisms underlying the learning and execution of fixed behavioural patterns are poorly understood. Here the authors reveal start/stop neuronal activity in basal ganglia circuits that emerge during task training in mice. Genetically altering these circuits disrupted the activity and impaired performance, providing evidence for a causal relationship between the specific neuronal activity and task learning.

    • Xin Jin
    •  & Rui M. Costa

  • Letter |

    Macrophages that populate the lymph nodes are known to clear viruses from the lymph and to initiate antiviral humoral immune responses. It is now shown that these macrophages also have another function: they prevent lymph-borne neurotropic viruses from entering the central nervous system. The mechanism is dependent on the production of type I interferon.

    • Matteo Iannacone
    • , E. Ashley Moseman
    •  & Ulrich H. von Andrian

  • Article |

    In the mammalian brain, the subventricular zone (SVZ) produces neural progenitor cells that migrate into the cortex to populate the upper layers. In humans this region is massively expanded, producing an outer SVZ (OSVZ). Here, live-cell imaging of developing human tissue was used to show that the OSVZ has similar characteristics to the SVZ, with progenitor cells proliferating in a way that depends on the Notch protein. The findings have implications for our understanding of how the complex human brain evolved.

    • David V. Hansen
    • , Jan H. Lui
    •  & Arnold R. Kriegstein

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