Public education and engagement are crucial in the process of assessing and applying societal values to the risks and benefits of neuroscience and the ethical dimensions involved. Explore what neuroethics is, why public engagement is key, and develop ideas on how to engage with the public regarding research in this Short Course 3 from Neuroscience 2017.

Material below is adapted from the SfN Short Course, Multiple Sclerosis: From Bench to Bedside and Back Again, by Steven L. Hauser, MD. Short Courses are day-long scientific trainings on emerging neuroscience topics and research techniques held just prior to SfN’s annual meeting. The connection between the type of immune cells called B-cells and multiple sclerosis (MS) was confirmed after unblinding a phase II clinical trial in 2006. The story of the challenges and successes that clinicians and researchers have faced in studying this connection reveals that coupling laboratory and clinical research can improve the efficacy of translational medicine. MS is a disease in which the immune system attacks cells of the brain and spinal cord, yet symptoms observed in rodent models used in the 1970s likely came from problems with the peripheral nerves.

Epilepsy, affecting millions globally, often leads to significant cognitive and psychiatric comorbidities, particularly in children. Anxiety and depression are particularly prevalent, with roughly a quarter of pediatric epilepsy patients having a comorbid diagnosis. Current treatments inadequately address these issues. Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), a melanocortin peptide, has shown promise in mitigating deficits after early life seizures (ELS), potentially through mechanisms beyond its canonical action on melanocortin 2 receptor (MC2R). This study explores the hypothesis that recurrent ELS is associated with long-term anxiety, and that treatment with ACTH can prevent this anxiety through a mechanism that involves melanocortin 4 receptors (MC4R) in the brain. Our findings reveal that ACTH ameliorates anxiety-like behavior associated with ELS, without altering seizure parameters, in wildtype (WT) but not in MC4R knockout (KO) male and female mice. Our findings also show that knocking-in MC4R in either ...

Human brain banks are essential for studying a wide variety of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, yet the variability in post-mortem interval (PMI)—the time from death to tissue preservation—poses significant challenges due to rapid cellular decomposition, protein alterations, and RNA degradation. Furthermore, the post-mortem transcriptomic alterations occurring within distinct cell types are poorly understood. In this study, we analyzed the effect of a 3-hour post-mortem interval on single-nucleus RNA signatures in the brains of wild-type (WT) and PS19 mice, a common model of tauopathy. We observed that basic quality control metrics (such as the number of genes and reads per cell), total nuclei counts, and RNA integrity number (RINe) remained consistent across all samples, regardless of PMI or genotype. However, a 3-hour PMI diminished the number of genes differentially expressed between PS19 and WT mice, suggesting an impact of delayed processing on the detection of disease-specific transcripto...

This Neuroscience 2017 event, based on the Entering Mentoring series, is designed for mentors of diverse trainees. Through an evidence-based approach, you will learn effective strategies to gain an understanding of best practices in mentoring. This event is led by master facilitators from the NIH National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN), whose mission is to provide all trainees across the biomedical sciences with evidence-based mentorship and professional development programming.

Karen Ersche’s work focuses on the neurochemical processes underlying addictive behavior and how to translate these findings into therapies. Her findings have contributed to new behavioral and pharmacological approaches. For this work, she was awarded the Jacob P. Waletzky Award in 2017. What led you to study drug addiction, particularly cocaine addiction? My enthusiasm for drug addiction research is rooted in the potential it has to make a difference in people’s lives. Scientific advances have fundamentally changed the understanding of addiction from a deficit of character to a brain disorder, and I strongly believe it will also provide the pathway for developing more effective treatments. My research aims to tackle the problems surrounding cocaine addiction, which is a fairly common disorder in the United Kingdom with few effective treatments.

This is a playlist of 19 videos from the 2016 FENS-Hertie Winter School. Since the groundbreaking description of patient H.M. in the 1950's, our understanding of human memory and the mechanisms underlying memory functions has increased dramatically in the last decades. Through extensive interactions with leaders in the field, the 2016 FENS-Hertie Winter School provided a comprehensive overview of both the basic and the latest knowledge about memory functions and their underlying mechanisms in humans.

Binocular disparity is used for perception and action in three dimensions. Neurons in the primary visual cortex respond to binocular disparity in random dot patterns, even when the contrast is inverted between eyes (false depth cue). In contrast, neurons in the ventral stream largely cease to respond to false depth cues. This study evaluated whether GABAergic inhibition is involved in suppressing false depth cues in the human ventral visual cortex. We compared GABAergic inhibition (GABA+) and glutamatergic excitation (Glx) during the viewing of correlated and anticorrelated binocular disparity in 18 participants using single voxel proton magnetic-resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Measurements were taken from the early visual cortex (EVC) and the lateral occipital cortex (LO). Three visual conditions were presented per voxel location: correlated binocular disparity; anticorrelated binocular disparity; or a blank grey screen with a fixation cross. To identify differences in neurochemistry, GABA+ or Glx levels w...

Motor skill learning enables organisms to interact effectively with their environment, relying on neural mechanisms that integrate sensory feedback with motor output. While sensory feedback, such as auditory cues linked to motor actions, enhances motor performance in humans, its mechanism of action is poorly understood. Developing a reliable animal model of augmented motor skill learning is crucial to begin dissects the biological systems that underpin this enhancement. We hypothesized that continuous auditory feedback during a motor task would promote complex motor skill acquisition in mice. We developed a closed-loop system using DeepLabCut for real-time markerless tracking of mouse forepaw movements with high processing speed and low latency. By encoding forepaw movements into auditory tones of different frequencies, mice received continuous auditory feedback during a reaching task requiring vertical displacement of the left forepaw to a target. Adult mice were trained over four days with either auditor...

Emery Brown, professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, discusses his career trajectory as a physician-scientist and his work-life balance. He delivered this talk during SfN’s Meet-the-Expert Series at Neuroscience 2017. The text below has been condensed and lightly edited and offer highlights from his talk. Listen to the audio recording above for the full remarks. Transitioning From Romance Languages to Circadian Rhythms I started out as an undergraduate at Harvard, majoring in romance languages. I knew I was going to go to medical school. I figured I would work for the World Health Organization, traveling around the world and stamping out diseases. However, in my sophomore year, my roommates concentrated in economics, and they talked like they understood the world. I then switched into economics, and in my junior year, I switched my major to applied mathematics. I also did an undergraduate thesis, and I wrote about studying outcomes from high-risk surgery. It was funded by the anesthesiology department at Massachusetts General Hospital. I didn't solve an earth-shattering problem, but it taught me how to formulate a problem, research it, and write it up.