Evolution of new cerebellar nuclei by excitatory progenitor diversification in the early rhombic lip

The cerebellar nuclei, the output regions of the cerebellum, have evolved via repeated duplication of a conserved cell type set to produce different numbers of nuclei across species. Here, we investig...

biorxiv.org

Systems and circuit neuroscience need an evolutionary perspective

To identify fundamental neuroscientific principles that generalize across species, neuroscientists must frame their research through an evolutionary lens.

thetransmitter.org

Exploring brain circuits, one cell type—or more— at a time

This issue of Neuron, with accompanying papers in Cell, Cell Genomics, Cell Reports, and Cell Reports Methods, contains studies describing methods for access to neuronal and non-neuronal cell types wi...

cell.com

Special Application Deadline for Students Accepted or Studying in the United States

oist.jp

Sensorimotor Transformations for Postural Control in the Vermis of the Cerebellum

The cerebellar vermis plays an essential role in maintaining posture and balance by integrating sensory inputs from multiple modalities to effectively coordinate movement. By transforming convergent s...

jneurosci.org

GitHub - oist/Physics-of-Behavior-Tutorials

Contribute to oist/Physics-of-Behavior-Tutorials development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Math and biology meet in the cerebellum

There can be surprising differences between what neurons do and what neurons cause

science.org

Teeth first evolved as sensory tissue in the armored exoskeletons of ancient fish, fossil scans find

Anyone who has ever squirmed through a dental cleaning can tell you how sensitive teeth can be. This sensitivity gives important feedback about temperature, pressure—and yes, pain—as we bite and chew ...

phys.org

DeepLabCut Workshop

A one day hands-on workshop on the use of the famous DeepLabCut software to analyze videos of animal behavior, led by Drs. Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis. Participants will be helped to pre-install th...

oist.jp

An evolutionarily conserved scheme for reformatting odor concentration in early olfactory circuits

Understanding how stimuli from the sensory periphery are progressively reformatted to yield useful representations is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. In olfaction, assessing odor concentration is key for many behaviors, such as tracking and navigation. Initially, as odor concentration increases, the average response of first-order sensory neurons also increases. However, the average response of second-order neurons remains flat with increasing concentration – a transformation that is believed to help with concentration-invariant odor identification, but that seemingly discards concentration information before it could be sent to higher brain regions. By combining neural data analyses from diverse species with computational modeling, we propose strategies by which second-order neurons preserve concentration information, despite flat mean responses at the population level. We find that individual second-order neurons have diverse concentration response curves that are unique to each odorant — some neurons respond more with higher concentration and others respond less — and together this diversity generates distinct combinatorial representations for different concentrations. We show that this encoding scheme can be recapitulated using a circuit computation, called divisive normalization, and we derive sufficient conditions for this diversity to emerge. We then discuss two mechanisms (spike rate vs. timing based) by which higher order brain regions may decode odor concentration from the reformatted representations. Since vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems likely evolved independently, our findings suggest that evolution converged on similar algorithmic solutions despite stark differences in neural circuit architectures. Finally, in land vertebrates a parallel olfactory pathway has evolved whose second-order neurons do not exhibit such diverse response curves; rather neurons in this pathway represent concentration information in a more monotonic fashion on average, potentially allowing for easier odor localization and identification at the expense of increased energy use. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

doi.org

Scientists Finally Make Heads of Giant Stingray Tails (Gift Article)

The long structures seen in manta rays and their relatives function as an early warning system, rather than a defensive weapon.

nytimes.com

The spinal premotor network driving scratching flexor and extensor alternation

Rhythmic motor behaviors are generated by neural networks termed central pattern generators (CPGs). Although locomotor CPGs have been extensively characterized, it remains unknown how the neuronal pop...

biorxiv.org

The non-model organism “renaissance” has arrived

Meet 10 neuroscientists bringing model diversity back with the funky animals they study.

thetransmitter.org