Protein tyrosine phosphatase receptor type Z1 ( Ptprz1 ) is one of the most abundantly expressed and enriched genes in astrocytes during development, yet its function in astrocytes is unknown. Using an astrocyte–neuron coculture system, we found that knockdown of Ptprz1 in astrocytes significantly impaired astrocyte branching morphogenesis. To investigate the function of Ptprz1 in astrocytes during brain development, we generated a Ptprz1 conditional knock-out mouse and deleted Ptprz1 from astrocytes postnatally, after the bulk of astrogenesis is complete. At postnatal day 21, we found subtle changes in astrocyte morphology and a reduction in the density of colocalized pre- and postsynaptic excitatory synapse markers across multiple layers of the visual cortex in both male and female mice, suggesting important functions for astrocytic Ptprz1 in both astrocyte morphogenesis and synaptogenesis. Ptprz1 is expressed in several neural cell types, including radial glial stem cells and oligodendrocyte progenitor ...

Laia Fibla and John Spencer discuss their paper, “Language exposure and brain myelination in early development”, published in Vol. 43, Issue 23 of JNeurosci, with Reviewing Editor Elana Zion-Golumbic. 

Laia Fibla and John Spencer discuss their paper, “Language exposure and brain myelination in early development”, published in Vol. 43, Issue 23 of JNeurosci, with Reviewing Editor Elana Zion-Golumbic. 

Join this interactive session as JNeurosci Reviewing Editors Bruno Averbeck and Anne-Marie Oswald discuss best practices for writing computational neuroscience papers for The Journal of Neuroscience. They will offer tips and strategies for how to organize the paper and clearly present technical material to the broad neuroscience community that is the readership of the journal. Attendees can submit questions at registration and live during the webinar.

The spinal cord innervates the entire body at and below the neck. Thus, spinal cord injury (SCI) negatively impacts the spinal cord and all organs below the level of the injury. For more than 20 years, Dr. McTigue’s work has focused on glial repair after SCI, including oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which is shown to robustly divide and differentiate into oligodendrocytes that generate new myelin after SCI.

Nana Voitenko, PhD, an SfN member based in Kyiv, Ukraine, and her lab members kept working even as Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Her work, which is focused on how the immune system affects chronic pain at a molecular and cellular level, was halted, however, Oct. 10, 2022, as Russia launched missile airstrikes on Kyiv and across Ukraine. In this interview with Voitenko, hear how the war in Ukraine has altered her life and research, and how scientific communities like SfN are more important than ever before.

Epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms are key contributors to alcohol use disorder (AUD). However, a better understanding of the specific genes, transcripts, and chromatin marks affected is necessary to inform novel pharmacotherapies. Here, we systematically investigate the genome-wide epigenetic and transcriptomic effects of ethanol across key brain regions relevant to AUD and assess how these outcomes differ between acute and chronic exposure in male C57BL/6J mice. We show that alcohol-derived acetate contributes to histone acetylation in the brain in response to acute or chronic exposure, with a broader and more robust effect following repeated exposure. Further, we find that chromatin and transcriptomic changes elicited by acute or chronic ethanol exposure are predominantly specific to brain region, and observe more robust dysregulation of gene and transcript expression following acute exposure. We show that ethanol-induced transcriptional changes are paradigm-dependent in some brain regions, most ...

The Neuroscience Scholars Program is a two-year training program open to underrepresented graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Building on 40 years of historic engagement, the program supports annual travel awards, mentoring, and the professional development of NSP Fellows and Associates. All materials available in this archive are provided open access to the field and are supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The contents of this series are solely the responsibility of the Society for Neuroscience and do not necessarily reflect the official views of NINDS. Learn more about the Neuroscience Scholars Program. Program Year 2023–2024

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What I feared happened. The Supreme Court of the United States in an expected decision of six to three, and following a trend of its conservative majority, eliminated the affirmative action law that until today allowed significant number of universities to guarantee that a portion of their matriculants would come from underrepresented groups if they met the admission requirements.