In addition to teaching neuroscience courses at Michigan State University (MSU), Jennifer Taylor and Casey Henley serve as the neuroscience program’s outreach co-coordinators.

As undergraduate students, we are at the earliest stages of our neuroscience careers.

The medial frontal cortex (mFC) and locus coeruleus (LC) are two brain areas that have been implicated in a range of cognitive phenomena, such as attention, memory, and decision making. Regulators of these brain regions at the molecular level are not well understood, but might help to elucidate underlying mechanisms of disorders that present with deficits in these cognitive domains. To probe this, we used chemogenetic stimulation of neurons in the LC with axonal projections to the prelimbic subregion (PrL) of the mFC, and subsequent bulk RNA-sequencing from the mouse PrL. We found that stimulation of this circuit caused an increase in transcription of a host of genes, including the Apoe gene. To investigate cell type-specific expression of Apoe in the PrL, we used a dual-virus approach to express either the excitatory DREADD receptor hM3Dq in LC neurons with projections to the PrL, or a control virus, and found that increases in Apoe expression in the PrL following depolarization of LC inputs is enriched i...

Increasing data suggest a crucial relationship between glycolipid metabolic disorder and neuropsychiatric injury. The aim of this study is to investigate the behavioral performance changes and neuropathological injuries in mice challenged with high-fat diet (HFD) and streptozotocin (STZ). The glucose metabolism indicators and behavioral performance were detected. The mRNA expression of IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, ocln, zo-1, clnds and protein expression of APP, p-Tau, p-IRS1, p-AKT, p-ERK, TREM1/2 were measured. The fluorescence intensities of MAP-2, NeuN, APP, p-Tau, GFAP and IBA-1 were observed. The results showed that combination of HFD and STZ/I.P could induce glucose metabolic turmoil and Alzheimer's disease (AD)-like neuropsychiatric dysfunction in mice, as indicated by the increased concentrations of FBG and impaired learning and memory ability. Moreover, the model mice presented the increased level of APP, p-Tau, p-IRS1, TREM2, IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, ocln, zo-1 and clnds, the decreased level of p-AKT, p-ERK a...

Delay discounting (DD) is a phenomenon where individuals devalue a reward associated with a temporal delay, with the rate of devaluation being representative of impulsive-like behavior. Here we first sought to develop and validate a mouse DD task to study brain circuits involved in DD decision-making within short developmental time windows, given widespread evidence of developmental regulation of impulse control and risk-taking. We optimized a T-maze DD task for mice that enables training and DD trials within two weeks. Mice learned to choose between a large and a small reward located at opposite arms of a T-maze. Once training criteria were met, mice underwent DD whereby the large reward choice was associated with a temporal delay. Task validation showed that adolescent C57BL/6J mice display increased preference for the small reward upon a temporal delay, confirming increased impulsivity compared to adults. We next used this DD task to explore the neural basis of decision-making. We used tyrosine hydroxyl...

The Ottawa Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience is an ever-growing group of young researchers in Eastern Ontario in Canada.

Leah Potter is a medical writer for Synchrogenix. Potter talks about her path from Vanderbilt, and how her PhD experience prepared her for a career in medical writing.

Explore these resources and personal stories highlighting different career path opportunities in the field.

Working like the insulation coating electrical wires, myelin — the fatty substance sheathing the thin fiber projecting from the neuronal cell body — protects those axons and supports efficient nerve transmission.

Maintaining concentration on demanding cognitive tasks, such as vigilance (VG) and working memory (WM) tasks, is crucial for successful task completion. Previous research suggests that internal concentration maintenance fluctuates, potentially declining to suboptimal states, which can influence trial-by-trial performance in these tasks. However, the timescale of such alertness maintenance, as indicated by slow changes in pupil diameter, has not been thoroughly investigated. This study explored whether “pupil trends”—which selectively signal suboptimal tonic alertness maintenance at various timescales—negatively correlate with trial-by-trial performance in VG and WM tasks. Using the psychomotor vigilance task (VG) and the visual–spatial two-back task (WM), we found that human pupil trends lasting over 10 s were significantly higher in trials with longer reaction times, indicating poorer performance, compared with shorter reaction time trials, which indicated better performance. The attention network test fu...