Deserts are among the most extreme environments on Earth. High temperatures and a lack of water impose powerful selective pressures on desert species, offering an opportunity to investigate the genetic basis of local adaptation. Despite the unique challenges of desert living, house mice (Mus musculus domesticus), a species native to Western Europe, have recently colonized […]

Systems operating near their critical point, or close to a transition between order and disorder, have computational advantages. In the case of neural networks, proximity to criticality is proposed to support optimal brain function. However, different cognitive processes rely on disparate computational demands. Using large scale electrophysiological recordings in behaving rodents, we examined how critical […]

Natural behavior unfolds as coordinated sequences of body movements. This organization suggests that behavior may be built from discrete motor patterns, yet how such arrangements are implemented by neural circuits remains unknown. Here, we combined kinematic analysis, muscle recordings, genetically identified cell types, and closed-loop optogenetic perturbations to examine the organizational logic of natural gap-crossing […]

Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disorder. Efforts to describe the underlying biology and establish diagnostic markers through non-invasive neuroimaging methods are ongoing, resulting in a range of theoretical brain-based frameworks. Prominent frameworks for aberrant schizophrenia-associated functional connectivity in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) include the dysconnectivity hypothesis, theory of cognitive dysmetria, and triple network […]

Neuromodulatory systems such as dopamine and acetylcholine enable cortical circuits to rapidly shift between behavioral states, yet it remains unclear how receptor-specific signaling reshapes what single neurons compute. Here, we combined whole-cell recordings from excitatory and inhibitory neurons in layer 2/3 of mouse somatosensory cortex with information-theoretic analyses under frozen-noise stimulation. We quantified stimulus-to-spike information […]

Organoids are powerful models of brain development and function. Mouse brain organoids reproduce the main steps of neurodevelopment in vivo and differentiate more rapidly than human organoids, making them scalable for screening applications. However, mouse brain organoids remain poorly defined. Here, we showed that the transcriptome of mouse brain organoids developed for three weeks is […]

Our ability to recognize sound sources in the world is critical to daily life, but is not well documented or understood in computational terms. We developed a large-scale behavioral benchmark of human environmental sound recognition, built stimulus-computable models of sound recognition, and used the benchmark to compare models to humans. The behavioral benchmark measured how […]

Infanticide, the killing of conspecific young, is a natural behavior observed commonly in non-parental animals across species, including mice. Our recent study in female mice revealed a mutually inhibitory circuit, composed of estrogen receptor alpha cells in the medial preoptic area (MPOAEsr1) and the posterior part of the bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNSTpEsr1), that […]

Beliefs about states of the world profoundly impact decision-making and learning, but little is known about how neural circuits represent and update beliefs. We performed projection-specific recordings and perturbations from neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) projecting to the intermediate or rostral caudate putamen (CPi/CPr) in rats performing a task with hidden reward states. Stimulating […]

The neural mechanisms supporting fMRI connectivity are poorly understood. Leveraging an aggregated analysis of novel and existing chemogenetic manipulations and electrophysiological recordings in the mouse medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), we show that local cortical excitability inversely modulates large-scale fMRI connectivity. Specifically, we find that bidirectional chemogenetic manipulations of cortical excitability produce opposite effects on fMRI […]

Translation reinitiation (REI) is one of the most important gene-specific regulatory mechanisms by which eukaryotic cells influence expression of main translons, for example during highly conserved integrated stress response (ISR). In S. cerevisiae, expression of the key stress response gene, GCN4, is controlled by an intricate interplay among four short upstream translons (uTranslons, formerly uORFs), […]