Scientific rigor broadly means good experimental practice. It means that other people can replicate your work and understand exactly what you did in the course of your experiments.

Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) signaling contributes to the specification of midbrain dopamine neurons, which go on to form the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc).

Physicians first noted severe mental illness ran in families nearly a century ago.

When Michael Wells attended SfN's 2017 Hill Day to advocate for federal funding of biomedical research, his reach went far beyond the Capitol. In between meetings with lawmakers, he also facilitated an engaging, personal conversation on mental health through the band Passion Pit’s Twitter handle. Throughout the year, Wells also makes it a priority to communicate how advances in scientific research connect to the human experience. Here, he shares what he’s learned about the importance of audience-first communication online and in-person.

A unique pool of immature glutamatergic neurons in the primate amygdala, known as the paralaminar nucleus (PL), are maturing between infancy and adolescence. The PL is a potential substrate for the steep growth curve of amygdala volume during this developmental period. A microglial component is also embedded among the PL neurons, and likely supports local neuronal maturation and emerging synaptogenesis. Microglia may alter neuronal growth following environmental perturbations such as stress. Using multiple measures in Rhesus Macaques, we found that microglia in the infant primate PL had relatively large somas, and a small arbor size. In contrast, microglia in the adolescent PL had a smaller soma, and a larger dendritic arbor. We then examined microglial morphology in the PL after a novel maternal separation protocol, to examine the effects of early life stress. After maternal separation, the microglia had increased soma size, arbor size and complexity. Surprisingly, strong effects were seen not only in the...

Fragile X autosomal homolog 1 (FXR1), a member of the fragile X messenger riboprotein 1 family, has been linked to psychiatric disorders including autism and schizophrenia. Parvalbumin (PV) interneurons play critical roles in cortical processing, and have been implicated in FXR1-linked mental illnesses. Targeted deletion of FXR1 from PV interneurons in mice has been shown to alter cortical excitability and elicit schizophrenia-like behavior. This indicates that FXR1 regulates behaviorally relevant electrophysiological functions in PV interneurons. We therefore expressed a genetically-encoded hybrid voltage sensor in PV interneurons, and used voltage imaging in slices of mouse somatosensory cortex to assess the impact of targeted FXR1 deletion. These experiments showed that PV interneurons lacking FXR1 had excitatory synaptic potentials with larger amplitudes and shorter latencies compared to wild type. Synaptic potential rise-times, decay-times, and half-widths were also impacted to degrees that varied bet...

A comprehensive analysis of everyday sound perception can be achieved using Electroencephalography (EEG) with the concurrent acquisition of information about the environment. While extensive research has been dedicated to speech perception, the complexities of auditory perception within everyday environments, specifically the types of information and the key features to extract, remain less explored. Our study aims to systematically investigate the relevance of different feature categories: discrete sound-identity markers, general cognitive state information, and acoustic representations, including discrete sound onset, the envelope, and mel-spectrogram. Using continuous data analysis, we contrast different features in terms of their predictive power for unseen data and thus their distinct contributions to explaining neural data. For this, we analyse data from a complex audio-visual motor task using a naturalistic soundscape. The results demonstrated that the feature sets that explain the most neural varia...

Literature focused on scientific rigor is ever-growing. In addition to the resources found in the Promoting Awareness and Knowledge to Enhance Scientific Rigor in Neuroscience collection, the articles below can help you explore various issues, solutions, and approaches to implement high standards of scientific rigor in your research.

How does the brain form new memories? Converging evidence shows that the key brain structures crucial for the formation of new memories are located in the medial temporal lobes (MTL).

Are you considering graduate school? Four neuroscience program faculty members explain the type of experience and considerations that may be beneficial before you apply.