Hot off the presses! Apr 01 Nat Rev Neurosci

The Apr 01 issue of the Nat Rev Neurosci is now up on Pubget (About Nat Rev Neurosci): if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the latest link at the home page. (Note you'll only be able to get all the PDFs in the issue if your institution subscribes to Pubget.)

Latest Articles Include:

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  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):183 (2011)
  
• Psychiatric disorders: The stresses of womanhood | PDF (134 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):185 (2011)
  Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a maladaptive psychiatric response to disturbing experiences that affects many individuals over the course of a lifetime, but the biological processes underlying the disorder are poorly understood. Now, Ressler et al.
• Addiction: Putting relapse into context | PDF (153 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):186 (2011)
  When recovered drug addicts encounter the environment in which they used to take drugs, there is a risk that they will relapse. Bossert et al.
• Behaviour: All's fair in love and war | PDF (173 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):186 (2011)
  Mating and aggressive behaviours in rodents have both been linked to the hypothalamus, but precisely which populations of neurons are involved in the encoding of these behaviours has remained unknown. A new paper shows that in male mice, the ventrolateral subdivision of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) contains neurons that are active during fighting, and that some of these neurons are inactive or suppressed during mating.
• Sensory systems: Mapping thermosensation | PDF (157 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):187 (2011)
  In mammals, several members of the transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channel family detect hot or cold stimuli, but how thermal stimuli are represented and processed in the brain is still unclear. In a study published in Cell, Zuker and colleagues showed that in Drosophila melanogaster, hot- and cold-sensing neurons project to distinct but adjacent regions in the protocerebrum, forming a thermotopic map.
• Neurodegenerative disease | Metabolism | Learning and memory | Stem cells | PDF (97 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):187 (2011)
  Inhibition of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide-binding alcohol dehydrogenase–Aβ interaction reduces Aβ accumulation and improves mitochondrial function in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease Yao, J.et al. J. Neurosci. 31, 2313–2320 (2011)
• Development: Birthdate rules odour processing | PDF (144 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):188 (2011)
  Determining the factors and mechanisms that enable the molecular features of an odour to be relayed to the olfactory bulb and the olfactory cortex is key to understanding odour information processing. Imamura et al.
• Development: The default position | PDF (131 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):188 (2011)
  Neural induction — the process whereby the pluripotent cells of the ectoderm (also known as the late epiblast) are converted to the neurally committed cells of the neuroectoderm — does not require extrinsic signalling: ectodermal cells inevitably become neuroectoderm in the absence of signals directing them towards an alternative lineage. However, the molecular mechanisms involved in this cell-intrinsic process are poorly understood.
• Memory: Tagging in the cortex | PDF (136 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):188 (2011)
  The consolidation of memory at the systems level is thought to involve communication between the hippocampus and the cortex, but the mechanisms involved have not been determined. Now, Lesburguères et al.
• Pain | Sensory systems | Motor systems | Olfaction | PDF (98 KB)
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):189 (2011)
  The effect of treatment expectation on drug efficacy: imaging the analgesic benefit of the opioid remifentanil Bingel, U.et al. Sci. Transl. Med. 3, 70ra14 (2011)
• Second messengers and membrane trafficking direct and organize growth cone steering
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):191 (2011)
  Graded distributions of extracellular cues guide developing axons toward their targets. A network of second messengers — Ca2+ and cyclic nucleotides — shapes cue-derived information into either attractive or repulsive signals that steer growth cones bidirectionally. Emerging evidence suggests that such guidance signals create a localized imbalance between exocytosis and endocytosis, which in turn redirects membrane, adhesion and cytoskeletal components asymmetrically across the growth cone to bias the direction of axon extension. These recent advances allow us to propose a unifying model of how the growth cone translates shallow gradients of environmental information into polarized activity of the steering machinery for axon guidance.
• From glutamate co-release to vesicular synergy: vesicular glutamate transporters
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):204 (2011)
  Recent data indicate that 'classical' neurotransmitters can also act as co-transmitters. This notion has been strengthened by the demonstration that three vesicular glutamate transporters (vesicular glutamate transporter 1 (VGLUT1), VGLUT2 and VGLUT3) are present in central monoamine, acetylcholine and GABA neurons, as well as in primarily glutamatergic neurons. Thus, intriguing questions are raised about the morphological and functional organization of neuronal systems endowed with such a dual signalling capacity. In addition to glutamate co-release, vesicular synergy — a process leading to enhanced packaging of the 'primary' transmitter — is increasingly recognized as a major property of the glutamatergic co-phenotype. The behavioural relevance of this co-phenotype is presently the focus of considerable interest.
• A new neural framework for visuospatial processing
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):217 (2011)
  The division of cortical visual processing into distinct dorsal and ventral streams is a key framework that has guided visual neuroscience. The characterization of the ventral stream as a 'What' pathway is relatively uncontroversial, but the nature of dorsal stream processing is less clear. Originally proposed as mediating spatial perception ('Where'), more recent accounts suggest it primarily serves non-conscious visually guided action ('How'). Here, we identify three pathways emerging from the dorsal stream that consist of projections to the prefrontal and premotor cortices, and a major projection to the medial temporal lobe that courses both directly and indirectly through the posterior cingulate and retrosplenial cortices. These three pathways support both conscious and non-conscious visuospatial processing, including spatial working memory, visually guided action and navigation, respectively.
• The structural basis of inter-individual differences in human behaviour and cognition
  - Nat Rev Neurosci 12(4):231 (2011)
  Inter-individual variability in perception, thought and action is frequently treated as a source of 'noise' in scientific investigations of the neural mechanisms that underlie these processes, and discarded by averaging data from a group of participants. However, recent MRI studies in the human brain show that inter-individual variability in a wide range of basic and higher cognitive functions — including perception, motor control, memory, aspects of consciousness and the ability to introspect — can be predicted from the local structure of grey and white matter as assessed by voxel-based morphometry or diffusion tensor imaging. We propose that inter-individual differences can be used as a source of information to link human behaviour and cognition to brain anatomy.