Material below summarizes the article, An Atoh1-S193A Phospho-Mutant Allele Causes Hearing Deficits and Motor Impairment, published on July 20, 2017, in JNeurosci and authored by Wei Rose Xie, Hsin-I Jen, Michelle L. Seymour, Szu-Ying Yeh, Fred A. Pereira, Andrew K. Groves, Tiemo J. Klisch, and Huda Y. Zoghbi.

Each stage of a scientist's career is filled with unique challenges that seem like roadblocks to becoming an advocate. Graduate school is no exception, but early career scientists should be advocating for science, as what this year’s budget provides can alter our career trajectories. As a graduate student, I first thought there wasn’t much I could do, and that advocacy could only be effective if it was intense and all consuming. Even if I figured out what to do, it seemed like it would be too much. I soon found this assumption to be false.

Lisa Monteggia, incoming Barlow Family Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, believes advocacy means “putting yourself out there” and “pushing someone forward,” ultimately “providing a base of support to really encourage someone to reach the goals they want to reach.” For Monteggia, advocacy is also about helping to train the next generation of neuroscientists. In this video, find out from her how to: - Leverage opportunities to advocate for yourself, such as awards, grants, and meetings. - Encourage and endorse others in simple yet meaningful ways. - Build your connections with mentors and peers to strengthen your network of support.

Material below is adapted from the SfN Short Course, Synapse Elimination and Learning Rules Coregulated by Major Histocompatibility Class I Protein H2-Db by Hanmi Lee, PhD, Lowry A. Kirkby, PhD, Barbara K. Brott, PhD, Jaimie D. Adelson, PhD, Sarah Cheng, BS, Marla B. Feller, PhD, Akash Datwani, PhD, and Carla J. Shatz, PhD. Short Courses are day-long scientific trainings on emerging neuroscience topics and research techniques held just prior to SfN’s annual meeting. Major histocompatibility complex class I (MHCI) proteins occur on nearly all vertebrate cells and function as a marquee for the immune system, displaying bits of non-self proteins from the cell’s cytosol on its surface. Now, researchers have shown in mice that a common MCHI protein, H2-Db, is required for shaping the synapses during the development of the retinogeniculate system.

I believe the key to an effective discussion about animal research is authenticity. I learned this firsthand during a lecture I gave at the University of California at Irvine’s Distinctive Voices Series organized by the National Academy of Sciences.

Synchronous activity of neuronal networks is found in many brain areas and correlates with cognition and behavior. Gamma synchrony is particularly strong in the dentate gyrus, which is thought to process contextual information in the hippocampus. Several network mechanisms for synchrony generation have been proposed and studied computationally. One such mechanism relies solely on recurrent inhibitory interneuron connectivity, but it requires a large enough number of synapses. Here, we incorporate previously published connectivity data of the dentate gyrus from mice of either sex into a biophysical computational model to test its ability to generate synchronous activity. We find that recurrent interneuron connectivity is insufficient to induce synchronous activity. This applies to an interneuron ring network and the broader dentate gyrus circuitry. Despite asynchronous input, recurrent interneuron connectivity can have small synchronizing effects but can also desynchronize the network for some types of syna...

Material below summarizes the article, Dominant Neuropeptide Cotransmission in Kisspeptin-GABA Regulation of GnRH Neuron Firing Driving Ovulation, published on July 11, 2018, in JNeurosci and authored by Richard Piet, Bruna Kalil, Tim McLennan, Robert Porteous, Katja Czieselsky, and Allan E. Herbison. Fertility in all mammals is governed by a small population of neurons scattered in the basal forebrain that secrete gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). GnRH neurons project to the median eminence and release GnRH into the pituitary portal blood system. In the anterior pituitary, GnRH stimulates secretion into the blood of the gonadotropins follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone (LH), which in turn act in the gonads to promote gametogenesis and sex steroid hormone production.

Diagnosing schizophrenia can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. The April seminar on The Future Now: (NEEDs) Neuroscience and Emerging Ethical Dilemmas at Emory focused on one innovative effort to improve this process in the flourishing field of digital phenotyping. Presenter and NeuroLex founder and CEO Jim Schwoebel had witnessed his brother struggle for several years with frequent headaches and anxiety, and saw him accrue nearly $15,000 in medical expenses before his first psychotic break. From there it took many more years and additional psychotic episodes before Jim’s brother began responding to medication and his condition stabilized.

Individuals with normal hearing exhibit considerable variability in their capacity to understand speech in noisy environments. Previous research suggests the cause of this variance may be due to individual differences in cognition and auditory perception. To investigate the impact of cognitive and perceptual differences on speech comprehension, 25 adult human participants with normal hearing completed numerous cognitive and psychoacoustic tasks including the Flanker, Stroop, Trail Making, reading span, and temporal fine structure tests. They also completed a continuous multitalker spatial attention task while neural activity was recorded using electroencephalography. The auditory cortical N1 response was extracted as a measure of neural speech encoding during continuous speech listening using an engineered “chirped-speech” (Cheech) stimulus. We compared N1 component morphologies of target and masker speech stimuli to assess neural correlates of attentional gains while listening to concurrently played short...

The importance of animal models to an understanding of the development and plasticity of visual functions was evident from the outset of the long experimental collaboration of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the early 1960s. Their initial work on kittens had massive impact in part because of the recognition that kittens share with primates substantial similarities of visual system organization and plasticity (e.g., eye-specific lamination of the thalamus and columnar organization of the visual cortex), as well as comparable visual abilities (including stereoscopic vision). In addition the plasticity demonstrated in response to early periods of selected visual exposure provided a glimpse into the origins of amblyopia. Five decades ago my laboratory developed a method for the fast measurement of visual thresholds in kittens in order to capture the consequences for spatial vision of the rapid physiological changes that occurred in the visual cortex during both typical development and those that follow vario...