Dorsomedial prefrontal rTMS for depression in borderline personality disorder: A pilot randomized crossover trial.

Background: Recently, a small literature has emerged suggesting that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) may offer benefit for MDD even in BPD patients, perhaps by enhancing cognitive control, and/or disrupting excessive 'non-reward' activity in right orbitofrontal regions. This study aimed primarily to assess the therapeutic effects of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC)-rTMS against MDD symptoms in BPD patients, and secondarily to assess whether the therapeutic effects ensued via mechanisms of reduced impulsivity and core BPD pathology on clinical scales (BIS-11, ZAN-BPD) or of reduced alpha- and theta-band activity on EEG recordings of right orbitofrontal cortex..

Assessment of brain age in posttraumatic stress disorder: Findings from the ENIGMA PTSD and brain age working groups.

Background: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with markers of accelerated aging. Estimates of brain age, compared to chronological age, may clarify the effects of PTSD on the brain and may inform treatment approaches targeting the neurobiology of aging in the context of PTSD.

Method: Adult subjects (N = 2229; 56.

Fluorescence Imaging of Mitochondrial DNA Base Excision Repair Reveals Dynamics of Oxidative Stress Responses.

Mitochondrial function in cells declines with aging and with neurodegeneration, due in large part to accumulated mutations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that arise from deficient DNA repair. However, measuring this repair activity is challenging. We employ a molecular approach for visualizing mitochondrial base excision repair (BER) activity in situ by use of a fluorescent probe (UBER) that reacts rapidly with AP sites resulting from BER activity.

Functional connectivity using high density EEG shows competitive reliability and agreement across test/retest sessions.

Background: Electrophysiological resting state functional connectivity using high density electroencephalography (hdEEG) is gaining momentum. The increased resolution offered by hdEEG, usually either 128 or 256 channels, permits source localization of EEG signals on the cortical surface. However, the number of methodological options for the acquisition and analysis of resting state hdEEG is extremely large.

Age-related changes in ongoing thought relate to external context and individual cognition.

Understanding how age-related changes in cognition manifest in the real world is an important goal. One means of capturing these changes involves "experience sampling" participant's self-reported thoughts. Research has shown age-related changes in ongoing thought: e.

Non-REM and REM/paradoxical sleep dynamics across phylogeny.

All animals carefully studied sleep, suggesting that sleep as a behavioral state exists in all animal life. Such evolutionary maintenance of an otherwise vulnerable period of environmental detachment suggests that sleep must be integral in fundamental biological needs. Despite over a century of research, the knowledge of what sleep does at the tissue, cellular or molecular levels remain cursory.

Targeting autonomic flexibility to enhance cognitive training outcomes in older adults with mild cognitive impairment: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

Importance: Cognitive training with components that can further enhance the transferred and long-term effects and slow the progress of dementia is needed for preventing dementia.

Objective: The goal of the study is to test whether improving autonomic nervous system (ANS) flexibility via a resonance frequency breathing (RFB) training will strengthen the effects of a visual speed of processing (VSOP) cognitive training on cognitive and brain function, and slow the progress of dementia in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Design: Stage II double-blinded randomized controlled trial.

Chromatin and gene-regulatory dynamics of the developing human cerebral cortex at single-cell resolution.

Genetic perturbations of cortical development can lead to neurodevelopmental disease, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To identify genomic regions crucial to corticogenesis, we mapped the activity of gene-regulatory elements generating a single-cell atlas of gene expression and chromatin accessibility both independently and jointly. This revealed waves of gene regulation by key transcription factors (TFs) across a nearly continuous differentiation trajectory, distinguished the expression programs of glial lineages, and identified lineage-determining TFs that exhibited strong correlation between linked gene-regulatory elements and expression levels.

Dendritic calcium signals in rhesus macaque motor cortex drive an optical brain-computer interface.

Calcium imaging is a powerful tool for recording from large populations of neurons in vivo. Imaging in rhesus macaque motor cortex can enable the discovery of fundamental principles of motor cortical function and can inform the design of next generation brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Surface two-photon imaging, however, cannot presently access somatic calcium signals of neurons from all layers of macaque motor cortex due to photon scattering.

Mapping human brain organoids on a spatial atlas.

Brain organoids are tridimensional, self-organizing cultures derived from pluripotent stem cells that recapitulate aspects of human neurodevelopment and can be applied toward investigating neural disease and evolution. In this issue of Cell Stem Cell, Fleck et al. (2021) describe a computational platform for mapping cell identity in organoids.

Microbial single-strand annealing proteins enable CRISPR gene-editing tools with improved knock-in efficiencies and reduced off-target effects.

Several existing technologies enable short genomic alterations including generating indels and short nucleotide variants, however, engineering more significant genomic changes is more challenging due to reduced efficiency and precision. Here, we developed RecT Editor via Designer-Cas9-Initiated Targeting (REDIT), which leverages phage single-stranded DNA-annealing proteins (SSAP) RecT for mammalian genome engineering. Relative to Cas9-mediated homology-directed repair (HDR), REDIT yielded up to a 5-fold increase of efficiency to insert kilobase-scale exogenous sequences at defined genomic regions.

Latent brain state dynamics distinguish behavioral variability, impaired decision-making, and inattention.

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have prominent deficits in sustained attention that manifest as elevated intra-individual response variability and poor decision-making. Influential neurocognitive models have linked attentional fluctuations to aberrant brain dynamics, but these models have not been tested with computationally rigorous procedures. Here we use a Research Domain Criteria approach, drift-diffusion modeling of behavior, and a novel Bayesian Switching Dynamic System unsupervised learning algorithm, with ultrafast temporal resolution (490 ms) whole-brain task-fMRI data, to investigate latent brain state dynamics of salience, frontoparietal, and default mode networks and their relation to response variability, latent decision-making processes, and inattention.

Disturbed temporal dynamics of episodic retrieval activity with preserved spatial activity pattern in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A simultaneous EEG-fMRI study.

Episodic memory (EM) deficit is the core cognitive dysfunction of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). However, the episodic retrieval pattern detected by functional MRI (fMRI) appears preserved in aMCI subjects. To address this discrepancy, simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG)-fMRI recording was employed to determine whether temporal dynamics of brain episodic retrieval activity were disturbed in patients with aMCI.

The Neural Representation of Force across Grasp Types in Motor Cortex of Humans with Tetraplegia.

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) have the potential to restore hand grasping and object interaction to individuals with tetraplegia. Optimal grasping and object interaction require simultaneous production of both force and grasp outputs. However, since overlapping neural populations are modulated by both parameters, grasp type could affect how well forces are decoded from motor cortex in a closed-loop force iBCI.

High-fidelity musculoskeletal modeling reveals that motor planning variability contributes to the speed-accuracy tradeoff.

A long-standing challenge in motor neuroscience is to understand the relationship between movement speed and accuracy, known as the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Here, we introduce a biomechanically realistic computational model of three-dimensional upper extremity movements that reproduces well-known features of reaching movements. This model revealed that the speed-accuracy tradeoff, as described by Fitts' law, emerges even without the presence of motor noise, which is commonly believed to underlie the speed-accuracy tradeoff.

A low-power band of neuronal spiking activity dominated by local single units improves the performance of brain-machine interfaces.

The large power requirement of current brain-machine interfaces is a major hindrance to their clinical translation. In basic behavioural tasks, the downsampled magnitude of the 300-1,000 Hz band of spiking activity can predict movement similarly to the threshold crossing rate (TCR) at 30 kilo-samples per second. However, the relationship between such a spiking-band power (SBP) and neural activity remains unclear, as does the capability of using the SBP to decode complicated behaviour.

An electroencephalographic signature predicts antidepressant response in major depression.

Antidepressants are widely prescribed, but their efficacy relative to placebo is modest, in part because the clinical diagnosis of major depression encompasses biologically heterogeneous conditions. Here, we sought to identify a neurobiological signature of response to antidepressant treatment as compared to placebo. We designed a latent-space machine-learning algorithm tailored for resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) and applied it to data from the largest imaging-coupled, placebo-controlled antidepressant study (n = 309).

Cortical Connectivity Moderators of Antidepressant vs Placebo Treatment Response in Major Depressive Disorder: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Despite the widespread awareness of functional magnetic resonance imaging findings suggesting a role for cortical connectivity networks in treatment selection for major depressive disorder, its clinical utility remains limited. Recent methodological advances have revealed functional magnetic resonance imaging-like connectivity networks using electroencephalography (EEG), a tool more easily implemented in clinical practice.

Objective: To determine whether EEG connectivity could reveal neural moderators of antidepressant treatment.

Inhibition-related modulation of salience and frontoparietal networks predicts cognitive control ability and inattention symptoms in children with ADHD.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with pervasive impairments in attention and cognitive control. Although brain circuits underlying these impairments have been extensively investigated with resting-state fMRI, little is known about task-evoked functional brain circuits and their relation to cognitive control deficits and inattention symptoms in children with ADHD. Children with ADHD and age, gender and head motion matched typically developing (TD) children completed a Go/NoGo fMRI task.

Simultaneous motor preparation and execution in a last-moment reach correction task.

Motor preparation typically precedes movement and is thought to determine properties of upcoming movements. However, preparation has mostly been studied in point-to-point delayed reaching tasks. Here, we ask whether preparation is engaged during mid-reach modifications.