Research articles

The authors developed methods to identify extracellular vesicles (EVs) in the blood that come from the brain by capturing EV surface proteins. This could be used in the future to diagnose neurological diseases.

This study shows that the sustained antidepressant-like effect of psychedelics is driven by 5-HT_2A receptor–β-arrestin signaling. Repeated low-dose LSD preserves this effect in mice without inducing hallucinogenic-like behaviors in mice or monkeys.

The dimensionality of intrinsic brain connectivity systematically shapes how task representations compress and expand across the cortex, and activity flow modeling shows the active role of network geometry in generating the transformation.

Jiang et al. developed a robust postnatal knockout platform for somatosensory genomics and behavioral screening, identifying Creld1 as a cross-modal regulator of somatosensation through its control of sensory neuron excitability via voltage-gated sodium channels.

Tang, Wu et al. identify a brain circuit that enables mother mice to wake selectively to pup cries. Motherhood strengthens this pathway through increased dopamine receptor D1 expression, helping mothers to be responsive to offspring during sleep.

SIK3 kinase controls synaptic NMDA receptor recruitment by phosphorylating GluN1 at a single site. Loss or inhibition of SIK3 markedly reduces synaptic NMDARs, while a gain-of-function mutation increases GluN1 phosphorylation and NMDAR levels.

This study identifies ABCA1 as a driver of dysregulated cholesterol trafficking in Parkinson’s disease, showing that reducing ABCA1 in astrocytes and neurons decreases cholesterol accumulation, α-synuclein pathology and neurodegeneration in mice.

Sensory and motor-associative identities in the thalamus arise from two early-diverging lineages, with sensory neurons progressing through shared intermediate states, revealing how thalamic organization emerges during development.

Molina et al. show in chronically stressed mice that neuronal and transcriptional adaptations in the habenula coincide with the onset of depressive phenotype, guiding temporally defined antidepressant interventions.

Using simultaneous intracranial recordings from interacting human brains, Ma et al. show that mutual cooperation emerges when amygdala activity aligns across partners and predictions about a partner guide each person’s own decisions.

Psilocybin promotes and stabilizes new connections between neurons in the mouse cerebral cortex, especially after stress. Baker et al. show that 5-HT_2A receptor signaling in layer 5 pyramidal neurons mediates this effect but is not required for a mouse behavioral proxy of hallucinations.

Hasenhuetl et al. show that neurons innervating the dorsal fan-shaped body of Drosophila form a half-center oscillator, a circuit motif typically found in central pattern generators for locomotion. Here, this circuit generates slow-wave activity for the regulation of sleep.

This study identifies a secreted phospholipase in the hippocampal dentate gyrus that mediates an aging-sensitive compensatory mechanism promoting cognitive resilience and neuroprotection.

Seal is an artificial intelligence framework that predicts the effects of regulatory variants in 802 brain cell states, revealing spatiotemporal gene regulation and pinpointing cell types and developmental stages associated with neuropsychiatric conditions.

This study identifies ependymal dysfunction as a mechanism linking inflammatory cerebrospinal fluid to increased ventricular permeability and periventricular pathology in multiple sclerosis.

Head-direction cells are far more disorderly than classical continuous-attractor models allow. Clark et al. show that this disorder is nevertheless compatible with these models and that the underlying connectivity matrix hides a circular symmetry.

Using simultaneous PET–MRI, McCulloch, Larsen and colleagues quantify LSD’s dose–occupancy relationship at the serotonin 2A receptor and reveal hemodynamic effects of LSD that contrast with those of psilocybin.

This study identifies common structural variants contributing to Alzheimer’s disease heritability. An expanded promoter CCG repeat increases FAM193B expression and disease risk, linking its expression to DNA damage and cell death pathways in neurons.

Hou et al. show a drug target compendium supported by human genetic and real-world patient data for Alzheimer’s disease and validate epoxide hydrolase 2 as a causal Alzheimer’s disease target using CRISPR interference and gene editing experiments in human models.

Chen et al. use 7-Tesla fMRI to show that the human superior colliculus has modality-specific, depth-dependent activity prior to visual or somatosensory events, resembling its response to actual stimulation.