"Pathways to Enhance Rigor: A Collection of Conversations” is a limited-series podcast featuring neuroscientists discussing ways to better embed rigor into every part of the scientific process, from experimental design to sharing with the public.

The retina encodes a broad range of stimuli, adapting its computations to features like brightness, contrast, and motion. However, it is unclear whether it also adapts when switching between natural scenes and white noise. To address this, we analyzed the neural activity of male marmoset retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in response to white noise and naturalistic movies. We trained linear-nonlinear models on both stimuli, evaluated their performance, and compared their receptive fields across stimulus domains. We found that models with spatial filters trained on one stimulus ensemble were less accurate when predicting neural activity on the other compared to models trained directly on the target stimulus. This suggests that spatial processing adapts to stimulus statistics. Different RGC types exhibited distinct changes: The OFF midget cells’ receptive fields became enlarged under natural movies, resulting in a lower cutoff frequency. Parasol cells and large OFF cells did not significantly change their recepti...

Is it time for me to retire? You are 60 years old and head a large laboratory with many exciting ongoing research projects and stable funding. Why would you consider retiring? This was my situation in 2017 when I was Chief of the Laboratory Sciences at the National Institute of Aging (NIA) Research Center in Baltimore. Despite the pleasures of working with lab members and collaborators, I was experiencing several recurring thoughts about science, society, and my family. First, the daily work towards and on research publications was becoming monotonous at times. Second, I was witnessing some graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and even junior investigators leaving science, and at the same time, the general public's trust in science was declining. There was also a data-driven reason for me to make room for younger scientists. Having spent more than 30 years studying brain aging, I was well aware that there is a progressive decline in brain performance - particularly processing speed, working memory, and creativity - that becomes evident in the fourth and fifth decades of life. Finally, I had spent 36 years devoting about 60 hours a week to research and had spent too little time with my family and had lost touch with the outside world.

Monserrat Orozco is a graduate student at the University of New Mexico pursuing a PhD in biomedical sciences, with a specialization in neuroscience. She is also a 2023 SfN Early Career Policy Ambassador (ECPA). In this interview, she shares how being a first-generation, low-income, bisexual, and Chicana student has shaped her personal and professional journey, and how the field of neuroscience can benefit from allyship and the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Monserrat Orozco is a graduate student at the University of New Mexico pursuing a PhD in biomedical sciences, with a specialization in neuroscience. She is also a 2023 SfN Early Career Policy Ambassador (ECPA). In this interview, she shares how being a first-generation, low-income, bisexual, and Chicana student has shaped her personal and professional journey, and how the field of neuroscience can benefit from allyship and the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Sparse labeling techniques are essential for morphological analysis of the central nervous system. Various sophisticated strategies have been developed, but conventional methods, such as Golgi-Cox staining and biocytin injection, remain widely used. Recent advances in adeno-associated virus (AAV) technology have enabled sparse neuronal labeling in rodents, either through postnatal AAV injection or by co-injecting a dilute Cre recombinase-expressing driver with a Cre-dependent amplifier. However, postnatal AAV injection requires prior preparation, and Cre-dependent systems are incompatible with Cre-expressing or floxed genetic backgrounds. Here, we present a Cre-orthogonal AAV-based sparse labeling method that utilizes Supernova technology in male and female mice. We employed Flpe recombinase to achieve Cre-independent labeling. An intra-retro-orbital injection of PHP.eB AAVs failed to label neurons, whereas local injection enabled the bright and sparse labeling of multiple neuronal types, including cerebel...

Congying Chu and David Elmenhorst discuss their paper, “Total Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Age Prediction Reversibly in Multisite Samples of Young Healthy Adults,” published in Vol. 43, Issue 12 of JNeurosci, with Editor-in-Chief Sabine Kastner.

Rodent hippocampal power spectra comprise of periodic and aperiodic components. The periodic components (brain rhythms) contain information about the behavioral or cognitive state of the animal. The aperiodic components are rarely studied and their functionality is not well understood, though have shown to be correlated with animal’s age or the excitation-inhibition ratio of the brain region. To study these components in the mouse hippocampus we modified the existing open-source FOOOF toolbox, which was originally optimized for EEG data. First, using simulated data, we show that our modifications decrease the error in assessment of the low frequency periodic components from 3% to 0.1%. Second, using tetrode electrophysiological signals from adult males, we compare the aperiodic activity within mice hippocampal sub-regions, CA1 and dentate gyrus (DG). Our optimization of FOOOF improved the aperiodic assessment errors by about 50% and were critical in making the first assessment of the aperiodic components i...

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Join this interactive session as Dr. Laia Fibla and Dr. John Spencer discuss their paper, “Language exposure and brain myelination in early development”, with JNeurosci Reviewing Editor Dr. Elana Zion-Golumbic.