Takahiro Noda, Eike Kienle, Jens-Bastian Eppler, Dominik F. Aschauer, Matthias Kaschube, Yonatan Loewenstein, Simon Rumpel
{"title":"Homeostasis of a representational map in the neocortex","authors":"Takahiro Noda, Eike Kienle, Jens-Bastian Eppler, Dominik F. Aschauer, Matthias Kaschube, Yonatan Loewenstein, Simon Rumpel","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01982-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01982-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Cortical function, including sensory processing, is surprisingly resilient to neuron loss during aging and neurodegeneration. In this Article, we used the mouse auditory cortex to investigate how homeostatic mechanisms protect the representational map of sounds after neuron loss. We combined two-photon calcium imaging with targeted microablation of 30–40 sound-responsive neurons in layer 2/3. Microablation led to a temporary disturbance of the representational map, but it recovered in the following days. Recovery was primarily driven by neurons that were initially unresponsive to sounds but gained responsiveness and strengthened the network’s correlation structure. By contrast, selective microablation of inhibitory neurons caused prolonged disturbance, characterized by destabilized sound responses. Our results link individual neuron tuning and plasticity to the stability of the population-level representational map, highlighting homeostatic mechanisms that safeguard sensory processing in the neocortex.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"102 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144219037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resilient cortical maps","authors":"Yaniv Ziv","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01957-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01957-8","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the loss of neurons during aging and the early stages of neurodegenerative disease, many cortical brain functions remain remarkably intact. Although this resilience is traditionally attributed to redundancy in neural networks, a new study uncovers a more active mechanism: dynamic homeostatic processes that preserve cortical representations in the face of neuronal loss. These processes recruit previously unengaged neurons and rearrange neuronal activity patterns to compensate for neuronal loss and maintain the integrity of representational maps in the brain.","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144219038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The brain creates action-based maps of the world near the body","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01959-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01959-6","url":null,"abstract":"Certain neurons have visual and auditory receptive fields anchored to body parts. We show that these neurons reflect the value of interacting with objects near the body, not just their spatial locations. A collection of these neurons furnishes animals with an egocentric map: a predictive model of the near-body environment.","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144219039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sachin P. Vaidya, Guanchun Li, Raymond A. Chitwood, Yiding Li, Jeffrey C. Magee
{"title":"Formation of an expanding memory representation in the hippocampus","authors":"Sachin P. Vaidya, Guanchun Li, Raymond A. Chitwood, Yiding Li, Jeffrey C. Magee","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01986-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01986-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How brain networks connected by labile synapses store new information without catastrophically overwriting previous memories remains poorly understood. To examine this, we tracked the same population of hippocampal CA1 place cells (PCs) as mice learned a task for 7 days. We found evidence of memory formation as both the number of PCs maintaining a stable place field and the stability of individual PCs progressively increased across the week until most of the representation was composed of long-term stable PCs. The stable PCs disproportionately represented task-related learned information, were retrieved earlier within a behavioral session and showed a strong correlation with behavioral performance. Both the initial formation of PCs and their retrieval on subsequent days were accompanied by prominent signs of behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), suggesting that even stable PCs were re-formed by synaptic plasticity each session. Further experimental evidence supported by a cascade-type state model indicates that CA1 PCs increase their stability each day they are active, eventually forming a highly stable population. The results suggest that CA1 memory is implemented by an increase in the likelihood of new neuron-specific synaptic plasticity, as opposed to extensive long-term synaptic weight stabilization.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144211362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jean-Paul Noel, Edoardo Balzani, Luigi Acerbi, Julius Benson, Cristina Savin, Dora E. Angelaki
{"title":"A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism","authors":"Jean-Paul Noel, Edoardo Balzani, Luigi Acerbi, Julius Benson, Cristina Savin, Dora E. Angelaki","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01965-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01965-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Computational psychiatry studies suggest that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) inflexibly update their expectations. Here we leveraged high-yield rodent psychophysics, extensive behavioral modeling and brain-wide single-cell extracellular recordings to assess whether mice with different genetic perturbations associated with ASD show this same computational anomaly, and if so, what neurophysiological features are shared across genotypes. Mice harboring mutations in <i>Fmr1</i>, <i>Cntnap2</i> or <i>Shank3B</i> show a blunted update of priors during decision-making. Compared with mice that flexibly updated their priors, inflexible updating of priors was associated with a shift in the weighting of prior encoding from sensory to frontal cortices. Furthermore, frontal areas in mouse models of ASD showed more units encoding deviations from the animals’ long-run prior, and sensory responses did not differentiate between expected and unexpected observations. These findings suggest that distinct genetic instantiations of ASD may yield common neurophysiological and behavioral phenotypes.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144201508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Wenlu Li, Paul George, Matine M. Azadian, MingMing Ning, Amar Dhand, Steven C. Cramer, S. Thomas Carmichael, Eng H. Lo
{"title":"Changing genes, cells and networks to reprogram the brain after stroke","authors":"Wenlu Li, Paul George, Matine M. Azadian, MingMing Ning, Amar Dhand, Steven C. Cramer, S. Thomas Carmichael, Eng H. Lo","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01981-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01981-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Important advances have been made in reperfusion therapies for acute ischemic stroke. However, a majority of patients are either ineligible for or do not respond to treatments and continue to have considerable functional deficits. Stroke results in a pathological disruption of the neurovascular unit (NVU) that involves blood–brain barrier leakage, glial activation, neuronal damage and chronic inflammation, all of which create a microenvironment that hinders recovery. Therefore, finding ways to promote central nervous system recovery remains the holy grail of stroke research. Here we propose a conceptual framework to synthesize recent progress in the field, which is currently dispersed and disconnected in the literature. We suggest that stroke recovery requires an integrated reprogramming process throughout the brain that occurs at multiple levels, including changes in gene expression, endogenous cellular transdifferentiation within the NVU, and reorganization of larger-scale neural and social networks.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144192725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kevin Rhine, Rachel Li, Hema M. Kopalle, Katherine Rothamel, Xuezhen Ge, Elle Epstein, Orel Mizrahi, Assael A. Madrigal, Hsuan-Lin Her, Trent A. Gomberg, Anita Hermann, Joshua L. Schwartz, Amanda J. Daniels, Uri Manor, John Ravits, Robert A. J. Signer, Eric J. Bennett, Gene W. Yeo
{"title":"Neuronal aging causes mislocalization of splicing proteins and unchecked cellular stress","authors":"Kevin Rhine, Rachel Li, Hema M. Kopalle, Katherine Rothamel, Xuezhen Ge, Elle Epstein, Orel Mizrahi, Assael A. Madrigal, Hsuan-Lin Her, Trent A. Gomberg, Anita Hermann, Joshua L. Schwartz, Amanda J. Daniels, Uri Manor, John Ravits, Robert A. J. Signer, Eric J. Bennett, Gene W. Yeo","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01952-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01952-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Aging is one of the most prominent risk factors for neurodegeneration, yet the molecular mechanisms underlying the deterioration of old neurons are mostly unknown. To efficiently study neurodegeneration in the context of aging, we transdifferentiated primary human fibroblasts from aged healthy donors directly into neurons, which retained their aging hallmarks, and we verified key findings in aged human and mouse brain tissue. Here we show that aged neurons are broadly depleted of RNA-binding proteins, especially spliceosome components. Intriguingly, splicing proteins—like the dementia- and ALS-associated protein TDP-43—mislocalize to the cytoplasm in aged neurons, which leads to widespread alternative splicing. Cytoplasmic spliceosome components are typically recruited to stress granules, but aged neurons suffer from chronic cellular stress that prevents this sequestration. We link chronic stress to the malfunctioning ubiquitylation machinery, poor HSP90α chaperone activity and the failure to respond to new stress events. Together, our data demonstrate that aging-linked deterioration of RNA biology is a key driver of poor resiliency in aged neurons.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144192726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rory John Bufacchi, Richard Somervail, Aoife Maria Fitzpatrick, Yusuke Murayama, Nikos Logothetis, Roberto Caminiti, Gian Domenico Iannetti
{"title":"Egocentric value maps of the near-body environment","authors":"Rory John Bufacchi, Richard Somervail, Aoife Maria Fitzpatrick, Yusuke Murayama, Nikos Logothetis, Roberto Caminiti, Gian Domenico Iannetti","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01958-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01958-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Body-part-centered response fields are pervasive in single neurons, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography and behavior, but there is no unifying formal explanation of their origins and role. In the present study, we used reinforcement learning and artificial neural networks to demonstrate that body-part-centered fields do not simply reflect stimulus configuration, but rather action value: they naturally arise from the basic assumption that agents often experience positive or negative reward after contacting environmental objects. This perspective successfully reproduces experimental findings that are foundational in the peripersonal space literature. It also suggests that peripersonal fields provide building blocks that create a modular model of the world near the agent: an egocentric value map. This concept is strongly supported by the emergent modularity that we observed in our artificial networks. The short-term, close-range, egocentric map is analogous to the long-term, long-range, allocentric hippocampal map. This perspective fits empirical data from multiple experiments, provides testable predictions and accommodates existing explanations of peripersonal fields.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144192889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Microglia eliminate inhibitory synapses and drive neuronal hyperexcitability in epilepsy","authors":"","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01983-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01983-6","url":null,"abstract":"In mouse models of epilepsy and human brain samples, hyperactive inhibitory signaling from neurons and complement signaling from astrocytes coordinate to drive microglia-mediated selective elimination of inhibitory synapses. This positive feedback mechanism disrupts the excitatory–inhibitory neurotransmission balance, which exacerbates neuronal hyperexcitability and contributes to the pathophysiology of epilepsy.","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144176657","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Wei Li, Khomgrit Morarach, Ziwei Liu, Sanghita Banerjee, Yanan Chen, Ashley L. Harb, Joel M. Kosareff, Charles R. Hall, Fernando López-Redondo, Elham Jalalvand, Suad H. Mohamed, Anastassia Mikhailova, David R. Linden, Ulrika Marklund
{"title":"The transcriptomes, connections and development of submucosal neuron classes in the mouse small intestine","authors":"Wei Li, Khomgrit Morarach, Ziwei Liu, Sanghita Banerjee, Yanan Chen, Ashley L. Harb, Joel M. Kosareff, Charles R. Hall, Fernando López-Redondo, Elham Jalalvand, Suad H. Mohamed, Anastassia Mikhailova, David R. Linden, Ulrika Marklund","doi":"10.1038/s41593-025-01962-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01962-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The enteric submucosal plexus regulates essential digestive functions, yet its neuronal composition remains incompletely understood. We identified two putative secretomotor neuron classes and a previously unrecognized submucosal intrinsic primary afferent neuron class through single-cell RNA sequencing in the mouse small intestine. Using viral-mediated labeling of each class, we uncovered their morphologies and neural projections in the submucosa–mucosa context, finding connections among all classes and an unexpected close association with enterochromaffin cells. Further transcriptome analysis at the postnatal stage and lineage tracing revealed that neuron identities in the submucosal plexus emerge through an initial binary fate split at neurogenesis, followed by phenotypic diversification, akin to the developmental process of the myenteric plexus. We propose a unified developmental framework for neuronal diversification across the gut wall. Our study offers comprehensive molecular, developmental and morphological insights into submucosal neurons, opening new avenues for exploring physiological functions, circuit dynamics and formation of the submucosal plexus.</p>","PeriodicalId":19076,"journal":{"name":"Nature neuroscience","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144164788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}