Archive by tag | Nature

Telepathy? I think not

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories:

From Supp Fig 10 of Kay et al.

There is just something about neural decoding that captures the imagination. Scientists “reading out brain activity” to infer what someone was seeing or doing sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But in practice, with the right dataset and right computer algorithm, it can be done – providing the question you are trying to query the brain is simple enough. But no matter how simple the question, with every paper comes an orgy of stories in the mainstream press about how scientists can eavesdrop on your thoughts or even engage in electronic telepathy. Thereby infuriating scientists and science journalists in droves, sometimes detracting from some very cool work.  Read more

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Awakening dormant genes with cancer drugs

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: ,

From Figure 1 of Huang et al.

Here’s one that first appeared online at the end of last year by Benjamin Philpot, Bryan Roth and Mark Zylka about a finding that could lead to a therapy for Angelman Syndrome. Angelman syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder affecting 1 in 15,000 live births and is characterized by developmental delay, lack of speech, seizures, and motor difficulties. There are no therapies available for core symptoms and individuals generally require care throughout life. Autism is often diagnosed in Angelman Syndrome individuals, and the same genomic region has been fingered as a culprit in both disorders. Angelman Syndrome is most commonly caused by deletion of a region on the maternal copy of chromosome 15 containing the gene UBE3A, conversely, some forms of autism may also be caused by duplication of this region.  Read more

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Patients help bring the study of Alzheimer’s to the dish

Posted by Noah Gray | Categories: ,

Patients help bring the study of Alzheimer's to the dish

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease that could become an even more massive public health problem than it already is, if current projections hold. Some predict that by 2050, 1 in 85 individuals will be affected by the disease. Currently, there is no cure, but there are neurotransmitter-enhancement-based strategies to slow down the cognitive deficits [the loss of cholinergic neurons is implicated in some of the memory problems associated with AD so therefore, pharmacological enhancement of brain acetylcholine concentration can partially alleviate some memory-based symptoms.] However, as with many neurodegenerative diseases, these stop-gap treatments only work for so long, until the cells responding to neurotransmitter supplementation treatments die off completely. Therefore, diverse strategies designed to cure or at least slow down AD are imperative.  Read more

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Timely inhibition

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: ,

Image: Tamily Weissman

This week’s paper is by Abigail Person and Indira Raman and is about information transmission between two cell populations in the cerebellum – purkinje cells in the cortex and their targets in the deep nuclei. Purkinje cells are justifiably famous for their spectacular anatomy  which enables integration of thousands of inputs. This paper, however, is about their output and how these exclusively GABAergic cells control the activity of downstream neurons. Conventional wisdom holds that there should be a straightforward inverse relationship between the firing rate of the two populations, but this has not always been observed. Person and Raman present a new solution based on spike timing – when purkinje cells spike asynchronously, their targets are inhibited (as expected), but when they spike synchronously, nuclear neurons can spike during the gaps in inhibition and end up time locking their activity to their inputs.  Read more

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Pulling back the editorial curtain on Nature’s papers

Posted by Noah Gray | Categories: ,

After a brief resurrection during the 2012  Society for Neuroscience meeting, the time has come to get a more regular series going on the old Action Potential blog! There are a lot of great (neuro)science writers out there (just to name a few,) so here at Nature, we wanted to be able to offer something different, something unique to supplement your weekly intake of neuroscience knowledge. Therefore, my editorial colleague I-han Chou and I will regularly blog about the latest neuro papers we publish in the journal, with particular attention to the back stories and our reasoning for offering publication.  Read more

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