{"title":"A Conversation with Daniela Schiller.","authors":"","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037606","url":null,"abstract":"Dr. Schiller: My research is on navigating “social space” and our “model system” is the human brain. Our behavioral protocols are probably more naturalistic and complex, but they are tightly linked to knowledge gained from basic neuroscience, in particular, regarding the spatial navigation system. We examine the hippocampus and related areas that are dedicated to navigating physical space. Similar areas are also implicated in episodic memory, and it is unclear how the two functions are related or why they are subserved by similar brain regions. One idea is that these systems perform a relational computation: They track statistical regularities and relationships between continuous dimensions. We took this idea into the domain of social relationships because social interactions could be framed as trajectories evolving in a two-dimensional social space framed by power and affiliation.","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"275-276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037606","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37173105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Conversation with Huda Zoghbi.","authors":"","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037721","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"293-295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37341817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Conversation with Li-Huei Tsai.","authors":"","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038042","url":null,"abstract":"Gary Stix: Could you talk a little bit about the whole Alzheimer’s field, which is a focus of a lot of your work, and the current state of the Alzheimer’s field? There are enormous numbers of drugs, but I always hear about 99-point-something that just have failed. There’s a real worry in the field that there’s no clear directions forward. Your work approaches some of the problems of the biology of Alzheimer’s in new ways. Could talk about what you think that problem is?","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"284-286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37110756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epigenetic Priming in Drug Addiction.","authors":"Philipp Mews, Deena M Walker, Eric J Nestler","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037663","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drug addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disorder that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and continued use despite negative outcomes. Current pharmacological therapies target neuronal receptors or transporters upon which drugs of abuse act initially, yet these treatments remain ineffective for most individuals and do not prevent disease relapse after abstinence. Drugs of abuse, in addition to their acute effects, cause persistent plasticity after repeated use, involving dysregulated gene expression in the brain's reward regions, which are thought to mediate the persistent behavioral abnormalities that characterize addiction. Emerging evidence implicates epigenetic priming as a key mechanism that underlies the long-lasting alterations in neuronal gene regulation, which can remain latent until triggered by re-exposure to drug-associated stimuli or the drug itself. Thus, to effectively treat drug addiction, we must identify the precise epigenetic mechanisms that establish and preserve the drug-induced pathology of the brain reward circuitry.</p>","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"131-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037663","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37112410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Investigating the Therapeutic Mechanism of Cannabidiol in a Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (iPSC)-Based Model of Dravet Syndrome.","authors":"Yishan Sun, Ricardo E Dolmetsch","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038174","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Dravet syndrome is an infantile epileptic encephalopathy primarily caused by loss-of-function variants of the gene <i>SCN1A</i> Standard treatment regimens have very limited efficacy to combat the life-threatening seizures in Dravet syndrome or the behavioral-cognitive comorbidities of the disease. Recently there has been encouraging progress in developing new treatments for this disorder. One of the clinical advances is cannabidiol (CBD), a compound naturally found in cannabis and shown to further reduce convulsive seizures in patients when used together with existing drug regimens. Like many other natural products, the exact therapeutic mechanism of CBD remains undefined. Previously we have established a human cellular model of Dravet syndrome by differentiating patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into telencephalic inhibitory and excitatory neurons. Here we have applied this model to investigate the antiepileptic mechanism(s) of CBD at the cellular level. We first determined the effect of escalating the concentrations of CBD on neuronal excitability, using primary culture of rat cortical neurons. We found modulatory effects on excitability at submicromolar concentrations and toxic effects at high concentrations (15 µM). We then tested CBD at 50 nM, a concentration that corresponds to the estimated human clinical exposure, in telencephalic neurons derived from a patient iPSC line and control cell line H9. This 50 nM of CBD increased the excitability of inhibitory neurons but decreased the excitability of excitatory neurons, without changing the amplitude of sodium currents in either cell type. Our findings suggest a cell type-dependent mechanism for the therapeutic action of CBD in Dravet syndrome that is independent of sodium channel activity.</p>","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"185-191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038174","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37318565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Conversation with Mehmet Fatih Yanik.","authors":"","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038018","url":null,"abstract":"Dr. Yanik: My background is in engineering, computer science, and physics. One of the things that always surprised me is how we treat the brain. It is probably the most sophisticated machine we know in the universe. It is more complex than our supercomputer networks, yet when we treat brain disorders, we basically perfuse the entire brain with chemicals expecting magic to happen. And magic sometimes happens, but more often it does not. Yes, people know about the involvement of complex network dysfunctions in brain disorders and have “proposals” for treating them. Yet, there has been no demonstration for fixing brain-wide dysfunctions. My inclination was that, at least in simple animal models, we should be able to look into these circuits at a very high resolution, at a single-cell resolution over the entire brain, and test whether we can indeed fix their brain-wide network dysfunctions just like we fix man-made artificial circuits.","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"290-292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37341819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Neurobiology of Confidence: From Beliefs to Neurons.","authors":"Torben Ott, Paul Masset, Adam Kepecs","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038794","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How confident are you? As humans, aware of our subjective sense of confidence, we can readily answer. Knowing your level of confidence helps to optimize both routine decisions such as whether to go back and check if the front door was locked and momentous ones like finding a partner for life. Yet the inherently subjective nature of confidence has limited investigations by neurobiologists. Here, we provide an overview of recent advances in this field and lay out a conceptual framework that lets us translate psychological questions about subjective confidence into the language of neuroscience. We show how statistical notions of confidence provide a bridge between our subjective sense of confidence and confidence-guided behaviors in nonhuman animals, thus enabling the study of the underlying neurobiology. We discuss confidence as a core cognitive process that enables organisms to optimize behavior such as learning or resource allocation and that serves as the basis of metacognitive reasoning. These approaches place confidence on a solid footing and pave the way for a mechanistic understanding of how the brain implements confidence-based algorithms to guide behavior.</p>","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"9-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.038794","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37388083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Conversation with Paul Glimcher.","authors":"","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037317","url":null,"abstract":"Dr. Glimcher: My lab’s really focused on understanding the core underlying biological basis of how we make decisions. That’s an area that we knew very little about 20, 30 years ago.We knew a lot about Pavlovian conditioning but really didn’t think about how people make choices and what the neural architecture for that looks like. Over the course of the last 25 years, as a community we’ve made tremendous strides in making fundamental insights into that. I think at this point we can say that we understand the basic neural architecture for making decisions. We understand how parts of the frontal cortex generate values, store them, how we learn what we like and what we don’t like, and then how those values are passed to areas of the frontal and parietal cortex for decision-making, for weighing options in a very formal, mathematical sense. It’s been a really exciting field to be in for the last 25 years, because it’s really a field that was born pretty much 25, 30 years ago. At this point we really have laid the groundwork for understanding how to change policy, how to understand things like drug addiction, how to understand decisionmaking.","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"249-251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037317","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36953505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decoding Depression: Insights from Glial and Ketamine Regulation of Neuronal Burst Firing in Lateral Habenula.","authors":"Yihui Cui, Yan Yang, Yiyan Dong, Hailan Hu","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.036871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.036871","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The rapid antidepressant effect of ketamine is arguably one of the most significant advances in the mental health field in the last half century. However, its mechanism of action has remained elusive. Here, we describe our latest discovery on how ketamine blocks <i>N</i>-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR)-dependent burst firing of an \"antireward\" center in the brain, the lateral habenula (LHb), to mediate its antidepressant effects. We also discuss a novel structure-function mechanism at the glia-neuron interface to account for the enhanced LHb bursting during depression. These results reveal new molecular targets for the therapeutic intervention of major depression.</p>","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"141-150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.036871","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36976919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Conversation with Michael Platt.","authors":"","doi":"10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037473","url":null,"abstract":"Dr. Platt: It is a bold claim to say something is a homology, because that really means that it basically arises from the same biological substrate. It emerges developmentally in the same way, it serves a similar function, and in terms of behavior it looks the same, as well. My statement isn’t just based on our work, but of course many other people as well. We have been fascinated by nonhuman primates and macaques in particular because their behavior, especially their social behavior, bears somany hallmarks of our own. They, like people, live in large groups that havemales and females. They live a long time. They identify each other on sight, they know who is related to whom, they know who outranks whom. They understand third-party relationships. One of the things that I think is really important about these animals is that they engage in behaviors that are very similar to ours to form cooperative alliances that they use to advance their own causes. Some monkeys invest a lot of time and energy in developing friendships. Friends come to their aid. We know that—just like for people—the deeper, more numerous connections that a monkey has, the better he or she is going to do. They’re going to live longer, they’ll be healthier, less stressed out, have more offspring. With people, it’s more or less the same thing: live longer, happier, healthier life, evenmakemore money. The functions and the behaviors themselves are very similar and what we, and others, have begun to discover is that essentially the system in the brain—the circuitry that allows us to manage our connections with others—is exactly the same as what the monkey has in his or her brain. It’s the same bits of stuff wired up in very similar ways. We have identified by comparison between monkeys and people that when we engage in various kinds of social interactions like this, the way that our brains process that information looks virtually identical to what we see in monkeys using complementary techniques.","PeriodicalId":72635,"journal":{"name":"Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology","volume":"83 ","pages":"272-274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1101/sqb.2018.83.037473","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"36976920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}