Valéria Muoio, PhD, is a neurosurgeon based in São Paulo, Brazil and a Neuronline Community Leader. Her institution held its first Brain Awareness Week, and here, Muoio discusses how Brain Awareness Week events can inspire, build a community at your institution, and increase knowledge about the wonder that is the human brain.

Neuroscience education is transforming by integrating cutting-edge technologies such as ChatGPT into classrooms. This AI-powered model, designed to emulate human-like interaction, offers a simplified and engaging avenue for comprehending intricate theories and ideas in neuroscience.

Read onto learn about Rebecca Ravenelle, a postdoctoral research fellow in the T32 Late-Life Neuropsychiatric Disorders program at Columbia University.

This interview is part of the “Meet the ECPAs” collection, which spotlights current Early Career Policy Ambassadors (ECPA) on their careers, interest in science policy, and current advocacy work. Read onto learn about Anastasiia Gryshyna, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham interested in basic science and pelvic pain.

Join this interactive session as Anthony Burgos-Robles and Ada Felix-Ortiz discuss their paper, “Prefrontal Regulation of Safety Learning during Ethologically Relevant Thermal Threat”, with eNeuro Editor-in-Chief Christophe Bernard.

In this one-hour long webinar, we will discuss key points of poster preparation and presentation, including where to start, how to visualize your ideas using text and figures, how to present to different audiences, how to handle questions and discussions at your poster, and how to follow up with your audience.

Inhibitory synapse formation is poorly understood compared to excitatory synaptogenesis, in part because the molecular events underlying assembly occur asynchronously and on timescales that have been difficult to resolve. Here, we exploit the ability of Semaphorin 4D (Sema4D) to rapidly and selectively induce GABAergic synapse formation in cultured hippocampal neurons, synchronizing these events to enable direct observation of pre- and postsynaptic protein dynamics by two-channel live imaging. We find that Sema4D promotes a population-wide increase in the mobility of GAD65-containing presynaptic boutons within 20 minutes of treatment while postsynaptic gephyrin scaffolds are mobilized only locally in a proximity-dependent manner, consistent with a presynapse-first model of inhibitory synapse assembly. Sema4D also drives recruitment of GABAARγ2 subunits to receptor-poor postsynaptic gephyrin scaffolds within 10 minutes of treatment, prior to detectable changes in GAD65–gephyrin colocalization, suggesting th...

Join Program Committee Chair Laura Colgin, Program Committee Member India Morrison, and Trainee Advisory Committee Member J. Alex Grizzell as they discuss how to put together an impactful abstract for Neuroscience 2024, which will be held in Chicago on October 5 – 9.

Following a traumatic brain injury (TBI), the neocortex undergoes time-dependent cellular responses including immediate tissue deformation, enhanced excitability and elevated expression of immediate early genes. However, the spatial extent of early neuronal activity after a focal injury remains unclear. Here we use Targeted Recombination in Active Populations (TRAP) reporter mice of both sexes to identify neurons activated in the acute phase following a controlled cortical impact injury applied to somatosensory neocortex. We find widespread cell activation across large portions of the cortex that extends beyond the astrocytic and microglial responses marking the injury site. Activated cells are predominantly neurons, and few cells co-label with GFAP or IBA1. Our findings reveal that even focal injury engages cortical circuits across large portions of the injured brain, highlighting the importance of considering cortex-wide neuronal dynamics in the early post-injury period and their potential impact on netw...

Animal learning can be analyzed on two timescales: task acquisition across training sessions and motivation fluctuations within training sessions. How do variations in motor and neurophysiologic activity relate to task performance over these timescales? Here, this question was examined in head-fixed mice performing a whisker-based sensory discrimination task. Male mice were trained for 12-14 daily sessions on a go/no-go task, each lasting approximately one hour to capture spontaneous performance fluctuations over minutes. Simultaneous to task performance, “non-performance variables” were tracked, including wheel running, pupil size, eyelid aperture and sensory cortical activity. First, motivation states were defined based on performance tendencies over minutes, leading to three state categories: persistent , disengaged , or attentive . Non-performance variables were found to predict these states independent of task correctness. Then, when further parsing these states by the go/no-go outcomes of hit, miss, ...