Over the past ten years, an in situ chemical synthesis approach to biological systems has emerged, in which functional materials are assembled within tissues such as the brain – either constructed throughout the intact tissue (hydrogel-tissue chemistry/HTC), or genetically targeted to cell types (genetically-targeted chemical assembly/GTCA). Resulting hybrid materials are endowed with diverse capabilities, including anchoring and labeling of RNA and protein, in situ sequencing, transparency, reversible size changes, and electrical insulation or conduction.

Speech in everyday life is often masked by background noise, making comprehension effortful. Characterizing brain activity patterns when individuals listen to masked speech can help clarify the mechanisms underlying such effort. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans of either sex to investigate how neural signatures of story listening change in the presence of masking noise. We show that, as speech masking increases, spatial and temporal activation patterns in auditory regions become more idiosyncratic to each listener. In contrast, spatial activity patterns in brain networks linked to effort (e.g. cinguloopercular network) are more similar across listeners when speech is highly masked and less intelligible, suggesting shared neural processes. Moreover, at times during stories when one meaningful event ended and another began, neural activation increased in frontal, parietal, and medial cortices. This event-boundary response appeared little affected by backgro...

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Felix Schneider discusses his paper, “Neuron Replating, a Powerful and Versatile Approach to Study Early Aspects of Neuron Differentiation,” published in Vol. 8, Issue 3 of eNeuro, with Editor-in-Chief Christophe Bernard. 

Neuronline is a benefit of SfN membership. Renew your membership now to make sure you don’t lose access.

Felix Schneider discusses his paper, “Neuron Replating, a Powerful and Versatile Approach to Study Early Aspects of Neuron Differentiation,” published in Vol. 8, Issue 3 of eNeuro, with Editor-in-Chief Christophe Bernard. 

Episodic timing refers to the one-shot, automatic encoding of temporal information in the brain, in the absence of attention to time. A previous magnetoencephalography (MEG) study showed that the relative burst time of spontaneous alpha oscillations (α) during quiet wakefulness was a selective predictor of retrospective duration estimation. This observation was interpreted as α embodying the “ticks” of an internal contextual clock. Herein, we replicate and extend these findings using electroencephalography (EEG), assess robustness to time-on-task effects, and test the generalizability in virtual reality (VR) environments. In three EEG experiments, 128 participants of either sex underwent 4 min eyes-open resting-state recordings followed by an unexpected retrospective duration estimation task. Experiment 1 tested participants before any tasks, Experiment 2 after 90 min of timing tasks, and Experiment 3 in VR environments of different sizes. We successfully replicated the original MEG findings in Experiment ...

There has been a long-term need for a low-cost, highly efficient, and high-fidelity epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU) suitable for synchronized multimodal home-cage monitoring of small-animal models of epilepsy and spreading depolarization. We present an accessible, scalable, highly space- and energy-efficient EMU capable of fulfilling chronic, continuous, synchronized, multiple-animal monitoring jobs. Each rig within the EMU can provide 16-channel high-fidelity, DC-sensitive biopotential recordings, head acceleration monitoring, voltammetry applications, and synchronized video recording on one freely moving rat. We present the overall EMU architecture design and subsystem details in each recording rig. We demonstrate long-term continuous in vivo recordings of spontaneous seizure and seizure-associated spreading depolarization from freely moving rats (male, 21; female, 6) prepared under the tetanus toxin model of temporal lobe epilepsy.

Perinatal exposure to the organophosphorus insecticide chlorpyrifos (CPF) is associated with an increased incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder. While these behavioral detriments have been modeled in rodents, the underlying functional alterations in the developing brain are largely unknown. Previous reports using a rat model have identified alterations to both inhibitory synaptic transmission and serotonergic (5-HT) receptor binding in the cortex following developmental CPF exposure. Here, we use a rat model of gestational CPF exposure to investigate whether this altered inhibitory activity is driven by increased spontaneous firing of inhibitory interneurons and altered 5-HT receptor expression. Using cell-attached ex vivo electrophysiology in young rats of both sexes, we identified a significant increase in the number of spontaneously firing neurons in the somatosensory cortex of CPF-exposed offspring. Analysis of action potential metrics identified a subset of these ...