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Nature Neuroscience
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A multidisciplinary journal that publishes papers of the highest quality and significance in all areas of neuroscience.
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Olfactory perceptual stability and discrimination
No two roses smell exactly alike, but our brain accurately bundles these variations into a single percept 'rose'. The authors now report that although olfactory bulb neurons decorrelate odor mixtures that are quite similar, piriform cortex neuronal responses show pattern completion and predict olfactory perception.
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Dopamine in amygdala gates limbic processing of aversive stimuli in humans
Dopamine is known to contribute to the amygdala-mediated aversive response, where increased dopamine release can augment amygdala function. Combining fMRI and PET imaging techniques, Kienast et al. present findings that suggest a functional link between anxiety temperament, dopamine storage capacity and emotional processing in the amygdala.
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Real-time chemical responses in the nucleus accumbens differentiate rewarding and aversive stimuli
fMRI studies suggest that nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation increases in response to stimuli of different hedonic valence, whereas physiological evidence suggests that NAc neurons show increases in activity for rewarding stimuli and pauses for aversive stimuli. Using cyclic voltammetry, the authors find that patterns of dopamine release and metabolic activity differentiate between rewarding and aversive stimuli.
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Distinct gating modes determine the biphasic relaxation of NMDA receptor currents
Following brief stimulation, macroscopic NMDA receptor currents decay with biphasic kinetics believed to reflect glutamate dissociation and receptor desensitization. The authors show that the fast and slow decay components arise from the deactivation of receptor populations that gate with short and long openings.
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Estimating the sources of motor errors for adaptation and generalization
The nervous system produces accurate movements by adapting to environmental changes. The authors construct a probabilistic model that compensates for motor errors and estimates their sources, finding that if the motor system used such a strategy, it would explain many previously observed movement-generalization phenomena.
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FGF acts as a co-transmitter through adenosine A2A receptor to regulate synaptic plasticity
Adenosine receptor A2AR is known to antagonize dopaminergic signaling in the striatum and its malfunctions have been implicated in various striatum-related diseases. Flajolet et al. show that A2AR and fibroblast growth factor receptor interact to synergistically activate ERK1/2 pathway and that such interaction modulates the morphological changes of cultured neurons and synaptic plasticity of cortico-striatal synapses.
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?-catenin?mediated Wnt signaling regulates neurogenesis in the ventral telencephalon
Genetic ablation of ?-catenin in the embryonic ventral forebrain restricted proliferation of neural precursors in the medial ganglionic eminence, resulting in fewer cholinergic projection neurons in basal forebrain and fewer calbindin- and somatostatin-positive interneurons in the cortex. This work suggests a crucial role for canonical Wnt signaling in ventral forebrain neurogenesis.
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Motor modulation of afferent somatosensory circuits
In sedated and whisking rats, the authors show that motor cortex activity enhances sensory processing through a cortico-cortico-thalamic feedback circuit. In whisking rats, however, inhibitory brainstem input to the thalamus was also enhanced, leading to a net suppression of thalamic sensory responses.
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