In this episode of History of SfN: 50th Anniversary, Marina Picciotto, Charles B.G. Murphy Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University and the editor-in-chief of JNeurosci, notes how the journal has evolved in its nearly 40 years to mirror the changing ways in which research is shared.

In this episode of History of SfN: 50th Anniversary, Marder, Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University and a past president of the Society for Neuroscience, expands on this thought, sharing details from her time on SfN’s Program Committee and about the evolution of annual meeting programs, as well as her award-winning research on motor neurons.

History of SfN: 50th Anniversary is a limited series podcast highlighting stories from the history of the Society for Neuroscience, recounting groundbreaking moments in the growth of the Society from the perspectives of current, past, and future leaders. Shatz, known for her discovery of the “fire together, wire together” phenomenon, offers insight into her research to understand how circuits change during developmental critical periods. She discusses both the advent of neuroscience as a field and the history of SfN’s annual meeting, including its 25th anniversary meeting.

Mychael Lourenco, a research associate at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and member of SfN’s Trainee Advisory Committee (TAC), shares what first interested him in neuroscience, why community building is important to him, and how he’s leveraged his connections for research collaborations. First, how did you get started in neuroscience? I'm from Brazil, and I live and work here. I have always been interested in science. My mother is an engineer and an academic, which may have led to my initial interest. I studied biology and specialized in genetics for my Bachelor’s degree, and, during that time, I became very interested in neuroscience, particularly in neurobiology of disease. As an undergraduate trainee, I first trained in models of Parkinson's disease. Then I found an interesting lab working in Alzheimer's disease and decided to join them, first for an undergraduate position and then for my PhD. During the past nine years, I've been studying what happens in the brain to cause memory loss in Alzheimer's disease. During my PhD, I had the opportunity to establish a collaboration in New York City at Columbia University. I went back and forth between Brazil and the United States to do experiments. Now I am a research associate at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I’ve been an SfN member since 2010. By the end of my PhD, I was glad to join TAC as a volunteer. I knew Sofia Jurgensen, who at the time chaired TAC, because she did her PhD in my lab when I was an undergrad. I exchanged a few emails with her and went through the process. I’ve met extraordinary people at TAC meetings, including Bianca Jones Marlin and Alexandra Colon-Rodriguez, young scientists, just like myself, who are eager to bring advances to the field and improve professional development for junior scientists. If you are interested in getting more involved with SfN, please contact us and/or apply to volunteer.

Christine Alvarado, an undergraduate professor at the University of California, San Diego, strives to create a healthy learning environment to set her students up for success. She believes students will grow in an emotionally productive classroom that encourages them to ask questions, fail, admit they don’t understand, and seek support. Conversely, if there is a lot of competition between peers, or the same student always raises their hand while the rest of the class is silent, there could be a need to update the classroom structure. To combat a negative — or even neutral — emotional learning environment, Alvarado implements specific tactics to keep students engaged, supported, and responsible for their own time management and learning: • Being transparent about her own failures. • Training her staff to respect different learning styles. • Implementing flexible homework policies. • Getting feedback from her students. • Creating learning communities. • Letting students fail without major consequences. “My policies are born out of the fact that I teach a lot of first year college students who, in many ways, are unprepared for the college environment,” she reflects. Ultimately, empathy is a key motivator for her. She says, “The whole reason I do my job is because I want every student to learn. Particularly the students who might not feel as comfortable, who might be doubting themselves or be scared. Those are the students I can really help.” Watch her video for more tips on the importance of building a supportive environment and advice for doing so.

Oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) receive synaptic input from a diverse range of neurons in the developing and adult brain. Understanding whether the neuronal populations that synapse with OPCs in the healthy brain is altered by demyelination and/or remyelination may support the advancement of neuroprotective or myelin repair strategies being developed for demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis. To explore this possibility, we employed cre-lox transgenic technology to facilitate the infection of OPCs by a modified rabies virus, enabling the retrograde monosynaptic tracing of neuron→OPC connectivity. In the healthy adult mouse, OPCs in the corpus callosum primarily received synaptic input from ipsilateral cortical neurons. Of the cortical neurons, ∼50% were layer V pyramidal cells. Cuprizone demyelination reduced the total number of labeled neurons. However, the frequency/kinetics of mini-excitatory postsynaptic currents recorded from OPCs appeared preserved. Of particular interest, demyeli...

Extracellular recordings in freely moving mice, especially those with movable electrodes (microdrives), are crucial for understanding brain function. However, existing microdrives are often heavy, expensive, fragile, and unsuited for long-term studies with multichannel recordings. The OptoDrive is a new, lightweight (3.2 g), low-cost system for chronic neural recordings and optogenetic manipulation in mice. It features a detachable, 16-channel tungsten-wire electrode assembly with a 3 mm stroke (15 μm step displacement) and an integrated optical fiber. This system enables repeated implantation and explantation without surgery, requiring only gas anesthesia. The OptoDrive has demonstrated stable recordings from the lateral hypothalamus of freely behaving mice for nearly 1 month and successful optogenetic silencing of neuronal activity. In conclusion, OptoDrive offers a cost-effective, compact solution for long-term electrophysiology and optogenetics in freely moving mice.

Perceptual localization of brief, high-contrast perisaccadic visual probes is grossly erroneous. While this phenomenon has been extensively studied in humans, more needs to be learned about its underlying neural mechanisms. This ideally requires running similar behavioral paradigms in animals. However, during neurophysiology, neurons encountered in the relevant sensory and sensory–motor brain areas for visual mislocalization can have arbitrary, noncardinal response field locations. This necessitates using mislocalization paradigms that can work with any saccade direction. Here, we first established such a paradigm in three male rhesus macaque monkeys. In every trial, the monkeys generated a saccade toward an eccentric target. Once a saccade onset was detected, we presented a brief flash at one of three possible locations ahead of the saccade target location. After an experimentally imposed delay, we removed the saccade target, and the monkeys were then required to generate a memory-guided saccade toward th...

Marker-based motion capture (MBMC) is a powerful tool for precise, high-speed, three-dimensional tracking of animal movements, enabling detailed study of behaviors ranging from subtle limb trajectories to broad spatial exploration. Despite its proven utility in larger animals, MBMC has remained underutilized in mice due to the difficulty of robust marker attachment during unrestricted behavior. In response to this challenge, markerless tracking methods, facilitated by machine learning, have become the standard in small animal studies due to their simpler experimental setup. However, trajectories obtained with markerless approaches at best approximate ground-truth kinematics, with accuracy strongly dependent on video resolution, training dataset quality, and computational resources for data processing. Here, we overcome the primary limitation of MBMC in mice by implanting minimally invasive markers that remain securely attached over weeks of recordings. This technique produces high-resolution, artifact-free...

Early life stress (ELS) increases susceptibility to cognitive and socioemotional dysfunction by disrupting the neurobiological systems that regulate these behaviors. Animal models provide a valuable tool for investigating the underlying mechanisms, enabling precise manipulation of stress exposure during development. The limited bedding and nesting (LBN) model, which induces maternal stress by restricting access to bedding and nesting materials in rodents, has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of chronic ELS. While this paradigm has been widely adopted, variations in apparatus designs and subtle differences in methodologies could impact consistency across studies. Here, we provide standardized guidelines for a cost-effective open–source mouse LBN apparatus design, which could further enhance the model's utility while supporting pup survival. We additionally present our findings observed during the duration of the LBN paradigm, which spans from postnatal day (PND) 2 to 10, for both dams and pu...