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.

Much of science advocacy is local by nature, but it also has tremendous potential to bring neuroscientists together on a global scale. In this episode of History of SfN: 50th Anniversary, Bill Martin, the president and chief operating officer of Blackthorn Therapeutics, traces the evolution of SfN’s role in global advocacy efforts throughout his time on its Government and Public Affairs Committee and continued involvement with the Society.

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.

Dmrta2 (also designated Dmrt5) is a transcriptional regulator expressed in cortical progenitors in a caudomedialhigh/rostrolaterallow gradient with important roles at different steps of cortical development. Dmrta2 has been suggested to act in cortex development mainly by differential suppression of Pax6 and other homeobox transcription factors such as the ventral telencephalic regulator Gsx2 , which remains to be fully demonstrated. Here we have addressed the epistatic relation between Pax6 and Dmrta2 by comparing phenotypes in mutant embryos or embryos overexpressing both genes in various allelic combinations. We show that Dmrta2 cooperates with Pax6 in the maintenance of cortical identity in dorsal telencephalic progenitors and that it acts as a transcriptional repressor of Pax6 to control cortical patterning. Mechanistically, we show that in P19 cells, Dmrta2 acts as a DNA binding-dependent repressor on the Pax6 E60 enhancer and that a point mutation that affects its DNA binding properties identified i...

Paying attention to a target talker in multitalker scenarios is associated with its more accurate neural tracking relative to competing non-target speech. This “neural bias” to target speech has largely been demonstrated in experimental setups where target and non-target speech are acoustically controlled and interchangeable. However, in real-life situations this is rarely the case. For example, listeners often look at the talker they are paying attention to while non-target speech is heard (but not seen) from peripheral locations. To enhance the ecological-relevance of attention research, here we studied whether neural bias toward target speech is observed in a spatially realistic audiovisual context and how this is affected by switching the identity of the target talker. Group-level results show robust neural bias toward target speech, an effect that persisted and generalized after switching the identity of the target talker. In line with previous studies, this supports the utility of the speech-tracking...

The rodent brain contains 70,000,000+ neurons interconnected via complex axonal circuits with varying architectures. Neural pathologies are often associated with anatomical changes in these axonal projections and synaptic connections. Notably, axonal density variations of local and long-range projections increase or decrease as a function of the strengthening or weakening, respectively, of the information flow between brain regions. Traditionally, histological quantification of axonal inputs relied on assessing the fluorescence intensity in the brain region of interest. Despite yielding valuable insights, this conventional method is notably susceptible to background fluorescence, postacquisition adjustments, and inter-researcher variability. Additionally, it fails to account for nonuniform innervation across brain regions, thus overlooking critical data such as innervation percentages and axonal distribution patterns. In response to these challenges, we introduce AxoDen, an open-source semiautomated platfo...

Savings refers to the gain in performance upon relearning. In sensorimotor adaptation, savings is tested by having participants adapt to perturbed feedback and, following a washout block during which the system resets to baseline, presenting the same perturbation again. While savings has been observed with these tasks, we have shown that the contribution from implicit adaptation, a process that uses errors to recalibrate the sensorimotor map, is attenuated upon relearning ( [Avraham et al., 2021][1]). Here, we test the hypothesis that this attenuation is due to interference arising from the different relationship between the movement and the feedback during washout. Removing the perturbation at the start of the washout block typically results in a salient error signal in the opposite direction to that observed during learning. We first replicated the finding that implicit adaptation is attenuated following a washout period that introduces salient opposite errors. When we eliminated feedback during washout,...

α-Synuclein is a synaptic protein that accumulates primarily in synucleinopathies and secondarily in certain lysosomal storage disorders. However, its physiological roles in health and disease are not fully understood. In part, this has been hampered by the inability to visualize α-synuclein and its cellular localization, due to the lack of specific antibodies and faithful reporters. Here, we used CRISPR/Cas9-based genome editing to generate human-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines in which the α-synuclein ( SNCA ) gene has been tagged with the short HA peptide either at the N-terminus or C-terminus or with the fluorescent protein mCherry at the C-terminus of the protein. These diverse strategies revealed the C-terminus HA-tag as the best option. C-Terminus HA-tagged α-synuclein had unchanged protein expression and did not generate degradation by-products. Importantly, we show that following differentiation to neurons, the C-terminus HA-tagged iPSC line had unaffected electrophysiological propertie...