Uncovering novel regulators of memory using C. elegans genetic and genomic analysis.

How organisms learn and encode memory is an outstanding question in neuroscience research. Specifically, how memories are acquired and consolidated at the level of molecular and gene pathways remains unclear. In addition, memory is disrupted in a wide variety of neurological disorders; therefore, discovering molecular regulators of memory may reveal therapeutic targets for these disorders.

Decreased Brain Ventricular Volume in Psychiatric Inpatients with Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Treatment.

Background: Brain ventricles have been reported to be enlarged in several neuropsychiatric disorders and in aging. Whether human cerebral ventricular volume can decrease over time with psychiatric treatment is not well-studied. The aim of this study was to examine whether inpatients taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRI) exhibited reductions in cerebral ventricular volume.

Dynamic Cholinergic Tone in the Basal Forebrain Reflects Reward-Seeking and Reinforcement During Olfactory Behavior.

Sensory perception underlies how we internalize and interact with the external world. In order to adapt to changing circumstances and interpret signals in a variety of contexts, sensation needs to be reliable, but perception of sensory input needs to be flexible. An important mediator of this flexibility is top-down regulation from the cholinergic basal forebrain.

Circuit-specific hippocampal ΔFosB underlies resilience to stress-induced social avoidance.

Chronic stress is a key risk factor for mood disorders like depression, but the stress-induced changes in brain circuit function and gene expression underlying depression symptoms are not completely understood, hindering development of novel treatments. Because of its projections to brain regions regulating reward and anxiety, the ventral hippocampus is uniquely poised to translate the experience of stress into altered brain function and pathological mood, though the cellular and molecular mechanisms of this process are not fully understood. Here, we use a novel method of circuit-specific gene editing to show that the transcription factor ΔFosB drives projection-specific activity of ventral hippocampus glutamatergic neurons causing behaviorally diverse responses to stress.