GABA and glutamate neurons in the VTA regulate sleep and wakefulness
We screened for novel circuits in the mouse brain that promote wakefulness. Chemogenetic activation experiments and electroencephalogram recordings pointed to…
Yu X et al. | Nature Neuroscience | December 17, 2018
Population coding of valence in the basolateral amygdala
The basolateral amygdala (BLA) plays important roles in associative learning, by representing conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs), and by forming…
Zhang X et al. | Nature Communications | December 5, 2018
Central amygdala circuit dynamics underlying the benzodiazepine anxiolytic effect
Benzodiazepines (BZDs) have been a standard treatment for anxiety disorders for decades, but the neuronal circuit interactions mediating their anxiolytic effect remain…
GJ et al. | Molecular Psychiatry | November 30, 2018
Dopamine enhances signal-to-noise ratio in cortical-brainstem encoding of aversive stimuli
Dopamine modulates medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity to mediate diverse behavioural functions1,2; however, the precise circuit computations remain unknown. One…
Weele CMV et al. | Nature | November 7, 2018
Hippocampal Place Fields Maintain a Coherent and Flexible Map across Long Timescales
To provide a substrate for remembering where in space events have occurred, place cells must reliably encode the same positions across long timescales. However, in many…
Kinsky NR et al. | Current Biology | November 1, 2018
Parabrachial CGRP Neurons Establish and Sustain Aversive Taste Memories
Animals have innate preferences for tastes accompanying calorically rich foods and aversions to tastes associated with potentially spoiled or toxic foods. In addition,…
Chen JY et al. | Neuron | October 18, 2018