Action Potential

Here's a question I've heard a few times: why don't we at NN, or any of the Nature journals, strip the author names off a manuscript before sending it out to peer review? This process, where not only the referees remain anonymous to the authors, but where also the authors might remain anonymous to the referees, is termed "double-blind peer review", and is practiced by some specialized biomedical journals. Recently, a group of young scientists published a plea to adopt "DBPR". A 1990 study published in JAMA concluded that DBPR improved the outcome of peer review; nevertheless JAMA itself has not adopted DBPR.

When confronted with the question, I tend to reply that DBPR simply wouldn't work for NN, because most reviewers would find it easy to guess the authors of a manuscript before them. After all, before you submit a paper to us, you have typically already presented a good part of the data to the community in the form of meeting posters, invited talks, etc. Also, authors tend to extensively cite their own previous work... My dialogue partners usually agree with these arguments, but still - DBPR would be easy to implement, so why not go ahead, even if it "worked" only some of the time?

Good question... I'd be very interested in hearing your opinions on this subject!

Posted by Annette Markus at 08:07 AMon December 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

Kessaris et al., Competing waves of oligodendrocytes in the forebrain and postnatal elimination of an embryonic lineage
Takano et al., Astrocyte-mediated control of cerebral blood flow
Wong et al., Retinoic acid receptor 2 promotes functional regeneration of sensory axons in the spinal cord

Comments welcome!

Posted by Annette Markus at 07:25 AMon December 28, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

Four new Nature Neuroscience articles were published online yesterday. Check them out, and as always, we'd be glad to have your feedback.

Kholmanskikh et al., Calcium-dependent interaction of Lis1 with IQGAP1 and Cdc42 promotes neuronal motility

Sato et al., DWnt4 regulates the dorsoventral specificity of retinal projections in the Drosophila melanogaster visual system

Sugino et al., Molecular taxonomy of major neuronal classes in the adult mouse forebrain

Urushitani et al., Chromogranin-mediated secretion of mutant superoxide dismutase proteins linked to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Posted by Cara Allen at 11:35 AMon December 21, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Other Contributors

We normally publish new papers online every Sunday, but none have gone up this week. Like the interruption to the blog over the weekend, this is because of our office move. We were planning to get new papers up today, but now we're tripped up by the strike that's shuttered the New York City public transit system - we cannot even get to our new office!

Good thing this blog is about neuroscience... else I'd be talking at length about what I think of a strike that keeps an eight million metropolis hostage the week before Christmas and Hanukkah...

In any case, we'll get the new papers up as soon as we can. Sorry to keep you waiting.

Posted by Annette Markus at 09:51 AMon December 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

I must admit I'm in "shock and awe" over the slow-motion implosion of the stem cell breakthroughs reported just months ago by Woo Suk Hwang's lab in South Korea, and their collaborators. At this point, it seems nobody really understands what exactly went wrong, and certainly nobody knows if any part of the group' s landmark May 2005 Science paper will stand.

First their ethics in procuring human egg cells came under scrutiny, precipitated by Pittsburgh co-author Gerald Schatten's very sudden and very public declaration in November to sever his collaboration with the Koreans. Personally, I wasn't too worried about these allegations, given that egg donors in the West are routinely paid to undergo the donation procedure for fertility clinic purposes. I remember well the regular ads in student papers that offered large sums of money for the eggs of those super SAT score high achievers...

But now the data reported in that paper are also under suspicion and, shockingly, the authors cannot produce the 11 cloned human stem cells lines they reported. A fungal contamination killed them, says Hwang, but some cell lines may yet be stored frozen, and could be used to verify their claims. We shall see... Hwang's collaborator (and co-author on the paper!) Sung Il Roh has in television interviews (!!) alleged last week that data for the landmark Science paper were fabricated and possibly no cloned stem cell lines were ever derived from patients.

Both Science and Nature have put up timelines on their websites (here and here), where anyone interested can try to untangle the mess for themselves.

The most reasonable voice last week came from a group surrounding Dolly-the-sheep creator Ian Wilmut, who in a letter to Science offer to analyze the Hwang group's cell lines as a means of independent verification. Of course, at this point it is not clear whether there are any cell lines left for them to analyze! Hwang and Schatten have asked Science to retract the paper, but still need to collect signatures from all their 25 or so co-authors...

The fallout of this disaster, for stem cell research and its public support, will be huge - not only in Korea.

Posted by Annette Markus at 09:26 PMon December 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

Due to servers moving to a new building, "Action Potential" will be unavailable from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening Eastern Time, December 16th through 18th. We'll be back on Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Annette Markus at 06:44 PMon December 14, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

Fox et al., Coherent spontaneous activity accounts for trial-to-trial variability in human evoked brain responses

Tanaka, Inactivation of the central thalamus delays self-timed saccades

Bermingham et al., The claw paw mutation reveals a role for Lgi4 in peripheral nerve development

Duff et al., Development of shared information in communication despite hippocampal amnesia

Hiramoto & Hiromi, ROBO directs axon crossing of segmental boundaries by suppressing responsiveness to relocalized Netrin

Liu et al., CaM kinase II phosphorylation of slo Thr107 regulates activity and ethanol responses of BK channels

Morgan et al., Axons and dendrites originate from neuroepithelial-like processes of retinal bipolar cells

Comments welcome.

Posted by Annette Markus at 10:30 AMon December 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

The December issue of Nature Neuroscience includes a special focus on computational and systems neuroscience highlighting research presented at the Cosyne meeting held this past March in Salt Lake City.

We think that combining theoretical and experimental approaches to studying neuroscience can be a tremendously fruitful approach to studying the brain. In a departure from our usual focus format, this special includes not only commissioned Perspectives, but also primary research articles that we think highlight the value of applying theory to empirical approaches.

Every one of the papers in the focus was subjected to our normal peer review process, and we applied our usual stringent criteria in making the decision to accept or reject. Each one of the papers and met the criteria for publication in a regular issue of Nature Neuroscience.

We hope you enjoy the focus – let us know what you think.

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:15 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Other Contributors

Neurons in visual cortex respond to all kinds of stimuli - spots, bars, gratings, noise, and photographs of supermodels. Are natural stimuli such as photographs better for figuring out how the visual system works than synthetic stimuli? The computation and systems focus features a pair of Perspectives taking separate sides of this debate. Gidon Felsen and Yang Dan present the benefits of natural stimuli , countered by Nicole Rust and Tony Movshon.

We’ve heard rumblings from the vision community about these two pieces and have received inquiries about opportunities to comment on them – here you are.

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:10 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
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Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:09 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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Neuronal correlates of subjective sensory experience

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:09 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
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Independence of luminance and contrast in natural scenes and in the early visual system

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:08 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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Neural population coding of sound level adapts to stimulus statistics

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:07 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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Matching storage and recall: hippocampal spike timing–dependent plasticity and phase response curves

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:06 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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Conditional dendritic spike propagation following distal synaptic activation of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons

Posted by I-han Chou at 10:06 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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Analyzing receptive fields, classification images and functional images: challenges with opportunities for synergy

Posted by I-han Chou at 09:40 AMon December 08, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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Imagine the scent of freshly baked rolls while browsing through these new NN papers... ;-)
As always, comments are welcome!

Dapretto et al., Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders

Aragona et al., Nucleus accumbens dopamine differentially mediates the formation and maintenance of monogamous pair bonds

Hofer et al., Prior experience enhances plasticity in adult visual cortex

Sharif Naeini et al., An N-terminal variant of Trpv1 channel is required for osmosensory transduction

Posted by Annette Markus at 11:38 AMon December 05, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Categories: Annette Markus

Unlike Annette, I’m a relative newcomer to the US of A, and I’m still fairly attached to my old stomping ground in the UK. And there is a knock-down, drag-out battle developing in the newspaper pages there about a scientific issue that I for one had thought was long gone: the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The debate of course goes back to the Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield way back in 1998, which suggested a link between the triple measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism (though the authors were careful to say that they had not established a causal link). This was followed by a precipitous drop in MMR vaccination in the UK, but in 2004, ten of the original co-authors of paper issued a ‘retraction of interpretation’ of the original paper in the face of increasing doubts about the results and the ethical conduct of the study. And a Cochrane review published last month concluded that there was unlikely to be a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which should have put the controversy to bed. Instead, as this well-written article by a parent with child suffering from autism suggests, it has led to resurgence of the whole argument, with salvos by both people against and for the original paper.

Quite apart from the controversy about the MMR-autism link, the whole story raises interesting issues about how science is handled by non-scientists, especially the media: most scientists rejected the idea of the link between MMR and autism, but this was enthusiastically taken up by a lot of British media. Can scientists do a better job of communicating the uncertainties inherent in research? Or as the Bad Science column right in holding the media largely responsible for misreported science? And do you think that there are some areas of neuroscience which are particularly prone to this kind of misreporting?

Posted by Charvy Narain at 11:15 AMon December 01, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
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