Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity. Students need information, guidance, encouragement, and support to develop their resilience and wellness practices, especially in the face of messages that such practices are shameful, trivial, or unnecessary. In this webinar we will discuss recent data on graduate student health, wellness, and vulnerable populations and share approaches to building programs to address these concerns.

Chemotherapy can cause debilitating behavioral side effects (e.g., fatigue, depression, cognitive decline); however, having an intimate partner can buffer these effects. The California mouse ( Peromyscus californicus ) is a rare monogamous mouse species that offers a novel opportunity to model human intimate partnership to identify the neurobiological mechanisms by which mate bonding reduces chemotherapy-associated behavioral side effects. As a first step towards this goal, this pilot study aimed to develop the first chemotherapy model, to our knowledge, in adult male and female California mice. Following a repeated paclitaxel chemotherapy regimen, well-characterized in laboratory mice ( Mus musculus ), gross sickness physiology was first assessed after various doses. The 20 mg/kg paclitaxel dose, injected six times every other day, was the highest tolerable, clinically-relevant dose and was characterized by moderate body mass loss and increased spleen mass. Thus, further investigation of the effects of th...

When compared to nature sounds, exposure to mechanical sounds evokes higher levels of perceptual and physiological arousal, prompting the recruitment of attentional and physiological resources to elicit adaptive responses. However, it is unclear whether these attributes are solely related to the sound intensity of mechanical sounds, since in most real-world scenarios, mechanical sounds are present at high intensities, or if other acoustic or semantic factors are also at play. We measured the Skin Conductance Response (SCR), reflecting sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity as well as the pleasantness and eventfulness of the soundscape across two passive and active listening tasks in (N = 25; 14 females, 11 males) healthy subjects. The auditory stimuli were divided into two categories, nature, and mechanical sounds, and were manipulated to vary in three perceived loudness levels. As expected, we found that the sound category influenced perceived soundscape pleasantness and eventfulness. SCR was analysed ...

Graduate school is a time filled with excitement, discovery, and, at times, stress, and anxiety. The complexity of learning what your interests are and planning your career during this time can be especially amplified for students pursuing transdisciplinary careers in the arts and sciences. As an undergraduate, I chose to study both music and the brain, and was encouraged to and discouraged from pursuing a career that combined the two by various faculty and departments — often in equal parts. But, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to combine my loves of music and the brain.

This webinar is exclusive for SfN members. Please log in or join or renew your membership below for access. The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges worldwide and has affected neuroscientists at all career stages. Neuroscientists who are actively looking for a postdoctoral fellowship or faculty position are facing hiring freezes and uncertainty. During this webinar, panelists based in academia and industry will highlight the challenges the pandemic has created for neuroscience employers and job seekers and provide job seekers with strategies for finding and applying for jobs at this time. Recent graduates, postdoctoral fellows, and early- and mid-career neuroscientists who are looking for a position in academia or industry are encouraged to attend.

The corticospinal tract (CST) is essential for forelimb-specific fine motor skills. In rodents, it undergoes extensive structural remodeling across development, injury, and disease states, with major implications for motor function. A vast body of literature, spanning numerous injury models, frequently assesses these projections. Despite this, a cohesive imaging modality for rapid, quantitative assessment of the bilateral cervical spinal cord projectome is lacking. To address this, we developed SpinalTRAQ (Spinal cord Tomographic Registration and Automated Quantification), a novel mouse cervical spinal cord volumetric reference atlas and machine learning-based analytical pipeline. Using serial two-photon tomography, SpinalTRAQ enables unbiased, region-specific quantification of fluorescently labeled CST presynaptic terminals. In healthy male mice, the CST exhibits a distinct bilateral synaptic projectome, with the densest innervation in laminae 5 and 7 on the contralateral side and lamina 7 on the ipsilate...

Understanding the roles of astrocytic calcium signaling in multiple brain regulatory mechanisms including metabolism, blood flow, neuromodulation and neuroinflammation has remained one of the enduring challenges in glial biology. To delineate astrocytic contribution from concurrent neuronal activity, it is vital to establish robust control and manipulate astrocytes using a technique like optogenetics due to its high cellular specificity and temporal resolution. The lack of an experimental paradigm to induce controlled calcium signaling in astrocytes has hindered progress in the field. To address this, in this study, we systematically characterize and identify light stimulation paradigms for inducing regulated, on-demand increases in astrocytic calcium in acute brain slice cortical astrocytes from MlC1-ChR2(C128S)-EYFP mice (of either sex). We identified paradigms 20%, 40% and 60% (of T=100s) to elicit robust calcium responses upon periodic stimulations, while the 95% paradigm exhibited a response only duri...

Understanding how neural circuits integrate sensory and state information to support context-dependent behavior is a central challenge in neuroscience. Oviposition is a complex process during which a fruit fly integrates context and sensory information to choose an optimal location to lay her eggs. The circuit that controls oviposition is known, but how the oviposition circuit integrates multiple sensory modalities and internal states is not. Using the Hemibrain connectome, we identified the oviposition inhibitory neuron (oviIN) as a key hub in the oviposition circuit and analyzed its inputs to uncover potential parallel pathways that may be responsible for computations related to sensory integration and decision-making. We applied a network analysis to the subconnectome of inputs to the oviIN to identify clusters of interconnected neurons—many of which are uncharacterized cell types. Our findings indicate that the inputs to oviIN form multiple parallel pathways through the unstructured neuropils of the su...

Depression and anxiety are often characterized by altered reward-seeking and avoidance, respectively. Yet less is known about the relationship between depressive symptoms and specific avoidance behaviors. To address this gap, we conducted two studies. In Study 1, undergraduates and online workers completed an uninstructed go/no-go avoidance task ( N Total = 465) as a reverse translation of a rodent paradigm. Participants exhibited a wide range of symptom scores on the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), ranging from low to severe. In Study 1, cues were used to signal the response type (go/active vs no-go/inhibitory) required to avoid an aversive sound. Higher depressive scores were associated with poorer acquisition of active avoidance in undergraduates. Overall participants showed lower accuracy for active than inhibitory avoidance. To examine whether the better no-go trial performance reflected a prepotent response to avoid aversive outcomes, in Study 2, undergraduates ( N Total = 330) completed a ver...

Given the observed interaction and reports of oxytocin, μ-opioid receptor, or κ-opioid receptor expression in brain regions important to emotion regulation (i.e., the central amygdala), we hypothesized that oxytocin ( oxtr ), μ-opioid ( oprm1 ), and κ-opioid ( oprk1 ) receptor mRNA were colocalized to the same cells in the central amygdala. RNAscope in situ hybridization performed on fresh-frozen coronal brain sections was used to label cells containing oxtr , oprm1 , and/or oprk1 . The coronal sections were imaged using a 40× objective (widefield fluorescence) on a Leica Thunder fluorescent microscope, and the images were processed using open-source ImageJ/Fiji software and analyzed using the Imaris software. The central amygdala was identified using Paxinos and Watson's The Mouse Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates ( [Paxinos and Franklin, 2019][1]). Eight distinct cell populations were enumerated (i.e., oxtr -only, oprm1 -only, oprk1 -only, oxtr  +  oprm1 -only, oxtr  +  oprk1 -only, oprm1  +  oprk1 -only,...