Neuroscience

Morphine regulates astrocyte transcriptional dynamics in the ventral tegmental area by stimulation of glucocorticoid signaling

1. Jennifer J Tuscher
2. Angela Cleere
3. Robert A Phillips
4. Catherine E Newman
5. Guy Twa
6. Nathaniel J Robinson
7. Lara Ianov
8. Robert E Sorge
9. Jeremy J Day

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study examines how chronic pain and opioid exposure interact at the cellular and molecular levels in a reward-related brain region. Using single-nucleus RNA sequencing, the authors map transcriptional changes in the rat ventral tegmental area following chronic inflammatory pain and acute morphine exposure. Notably, their convincing data support that acute morphine, not chronic pain, elicits a stress-related transcriptional response primarily in glial cells rather than neurons, challenging prevailing views of opioid action and supporting growing evidence for glucocorticoid signaling in glial responses. A limitation is the use of a single opioid dose and time point, and further discussion of these constraints would help clarify the broader implications of the findings.

Reviewed by eLife

Programmed Cell Death Modifies Neural Circuits and Tunes Intrinsic Behavior

1. Alison Kochersberger
2. Dongyeop Lee
3. Mohammad Mahdi Torkashvand
4. Sandeep Kumar
5. Saba Baskoylu
6. Titas Sengupta
7. Noelle Koonce
8. Chloe E. Emerson
9. Nandan V. Patel
10. Daniel Colón-Ramos
11. Steven Flavell
12. Andrew M. Leifer
13. Vivek Venkatachalam
14. H. Robert Horvitz
15. Marc Hammarlund

Reviewed by Review Commons

The Locomoting State Selectively Amplifies Activity of Sensitizing Neurons in Primary Visual Cortex

1. Antonio J Hinojosa
2. Yehor Kosiachkin
3. Sina E Dominiak
4. Benjamin D Evans
5. Leon Lagnado

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript presents a valuable analysis of how locomotion modulates the activity of different subtypes of cortical neurons in the mouse primary visual cortex, showing that locomotion more strongly increases responses in sensitizing than in depressing excitatory cells. This data is then used to constrain a model of the responses. While the data are very interesting, the analyses remain incomplete, in particular due to concerns surrounding the modelling.

Reviewed by eLife

Consciously detecting and recognizing a past visual word after its sensory trace is gone

1. Daphné Rimsky Robert
2. Matteo Lisi
3. Kevin Nguy
4. Roxane Jannin
5. Thomas Hardy
6. Nathan Beraud
7. Claire Sergent

Reviewed by preLights

Trial-by-trial inter-areal interactions in visual cortex in the presence or absence of visual stimulation

1. Dianna Hidalgo
2. Giorgia Dellaferrera
3. Giordano Ramos-Traslosheros
4. Will Xiao
5. Carlos R Ponce
6. Maria Papadopouli
7. Stelios Smirnakis
8. Gabriel Kreiman

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study investigates trial-by-trial intra- and inter-cortical interactions in the visual cortex of the mouse and the monkey. The authors find that activity in one layer (in mice) or one area (in monkeys) can partially predict neural activity in another layer or area on the single-trial level in different experimental contexts. This valuable finding expands previously known contributions of stimulus-independent downstream activity to neural responses in the visual cortex by demonstrating how these change under varying visual stimuli as well as in the absence of visual stimulation. While the methodology is solid, the juxtaposition of mouse and monkey data from different modalities and at difference scales limits the interpretability of the observations and forces superficial comparisons. More in-depth focus on either data set in isolation may reveal more nuanced understanding of cortical interactions rather than trying to draw parallels between very different datasets.

Reviewed by eLife