Microglia — the macrophages of the central nervous system (CNS) — not only perform immune functions, but also sculpt the brain. They regulate neuronal development, play roles in plasticity and neurodegeneration, and prune synapses. Understanding how these cells function has helped researchers better understand how synapses can change during disease and may even lead to new therapies. Researchers now know that microglia differ from macrophages in other tissues, in that they perform specialized CNS-related functions. But within microglia, many different transcriptional profiles exist that depend upon sex, cellular age, development, brain location, and the resident bacteria of the gut and likely reflect each cell’s specialized function. Studies that provide a more in depth look a microglia profiles will help illuminate their plasticity and many functions.

In the last few decades, there has been an increasing push towards making science more participatory by engaging those who are part of or invested in the community that will be impacted by the research in the actual research process, from determining the questions that are worth asking, to contributing to experimental design, to communicating findings to the public.

The goal of any scientific presentation is to connect with your audience. What should you do before and during your talk to ensure that happens and you feel comfortable and enjoy the process? Following common guiding principles, such as knowing your audience and rehearsing ahead of time, will help you craft and deliver engaging messages. To help you design an impactful talk, SfN has created a toolkit on the three overarching elements of successful science presentations: structure/narrative, visual aids, and delivery.

Auditory masking—the interference of the encoding and processing of an acoustic stimulus imposed by one or more competing stimuli—is nearly omnipresent in daily life, and presents a critical barrier to many listeners, including people with hearing loss, users of hearing aids and cochlear implants, and people with auditory processing disorders. The perceptual aspects of masking have been actively studied for several decades, and particular emphasis has been placed on masking of speech by other speech sounds. The neural effects of such masking, especially at the subcortical level, have been much less studied, in large part due to the technical limitations of making such measurements. Recent work has allowed estimation of the auditory brainstem response (ABR), whose characteristic waves are linked to specific subcortical areas, to naturalistic speech. In this study, we used those techniques to measure the encoding of speech stimuli that were masked by one or more simultaneous other speech stimuli. We presente...

From a panel of experts, get tips on how to identify the right grant mechanism for your career stage and who to contact for help, and understand how your application will be reviewed and how NIH Institutes finalize funding decisions. You will also hear helpful suggestions to maximize your chances for writing a successful application.

If you plan to pursue a graduate degree, consider the ways you can differentiate yourself, as suggested by neuroscience program faculty.

Material below summarizes the article, Phosphoinositol-4,5-bisphosphate Regulates Auditory Hair Cell Mechanotransduction Channel Pore Properties and Fast Adaptation, published on October 24, 2017, in JNeurosci and authored by Thomas Effertz, Lars Becker, Anthony W. Peng, and Anthony J. Ricci. In vertebrates, sound is detected by the organ of Corti, a sensory epithelium located inside the cochlea, the snail shell shaped part of our inner ear. The organ of Corti comprises one row of inner hair cells (IHC), which function as microphones, and three rows of outer hair cells (OHC), which function as amplifiers of faint sound stimuli. Both IHCs and OHCs possess a sensory organelle, termed hair bundle, on their apical surface that consists of multiple rows of actin-filled stereocilia. The stereocilia are arranged in a staircase pattern, with each shorter stereocilium connected to its taller neighbor at the tips through filaments, termed tip links. Sound stimulation ultimately leads to fluid motions inside of the cochlea that result in hair bundle deflection. Deflections towards the tallest stereocilia row cause tip links to pull at the tips of each shorter stereocilium. Those pulls directly open mechano-electrical transduction (MET) channels, which allow inflow of cations and thus the translation of mechanical stimuli into electro-/chemical cell signals.

Material below summarizes the article, Basolateral Amygdala Neurons Maintain Aversive Emotional Salience, published on March 21, 2018, in JNeurosci and authored by Auntora Sengupta, Joanna O.Y. Yau, Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel, Yu Liu, Zayra E. Millan, John M. Power, and Gavan P. McNally. The ability to learn about and respond to sources of danger is essential to survival. A variety of lines of evidence, ranging from single-unit recording studies in rodents to functional neuroimaging or neuropsychological studies in humans, show the amygdala is critical for this learning. Fear learning can be studied in laboratory animals using Pavlovian fear conditioning. The experimenter arranges a conditioned stimulus (CS) (e.g., an auditory stimulus) to signal delivery of an aversive event (e.g., shock to the paws). The consequence of these pairings is the animal will show fear responses to the CS when it’s subsequently encountered. This fear learning is readily acquired, often within a few trials, and it persists for a long time. Despite this procedural simplicity, fear learning is not a simple process. It involves complex psychological processes of attention, stimulus selection, error-detection, and stimulus processing.

In 1842, Charles Dickens visited the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia to examine what was being called a revolutionary form of rehabilitation. After his visit, he summarized his observations into an essay in which he stated, “I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” Dickens’ words describe solitary confinement. While there is no one standard for solitary confinement conditions, it usually involves an individual being placed in complete sensory and social isolation for 23 hours a day. What Dickens observed in 1842 is not unlike current solitary confinement conditions. At its start, the justice system was meant to be rehabilitative, a place for individuals to learn from their mistakes and return to the community as productive members of society. This was an ideal model but was not executed as well as described. In the 1970s it appeared that the current techniques were not working (rising crime rate and disenchantment with current state) and the system took a turn toward more punitive goals. Still, some scholars argue that the ideas behind rehabilitative treatment are embedded and possibly still growing within our current justice system.

Material below is adapted from the SfN Short Course, TREM2 Variants: New Keys to Decipher Alzheimer’s Disease Pathogenesis by Marco Colonna, MD, and Yaming Wang, PhD. Short Courses are day-long scientific trainings on emerging neuroscience topics and research techniques held just prior to SfN’s annual meeting. Mutations in the gene that encodes triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) were originally discovered in patients with a very rare form of inheritable dementia. TREM2 is a transmembrane protein expressed on the surface of microglia, the cells that function as macrophages in the central nervous system (CNS). The receptor senses lipids and has multiple downstream effects, including increased calcium signaling and remodeling of the cytoskeletal protein actin. Now, researchers are investigating a role for this receptor in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).