The researchers demonstrated that auditory gamma oscillation is globally distributed among the temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices by using intracranial recordings implanted for the diagnostic purpose of the intractable epilepsy. Elucidation of the mechanism of gamma oscillation, which is decreased in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, is expected to be useful for the development of future diagnosis and treatment.

Comprehensive expression analysis of genes associated with developmental disorders and psychiatric disorders in the common marmoset brain revealed that these genes are expressed in a specific brain region. Also, by comparing the expression patterns of the mouse and human brain, it was clarified that there are many common expression patterns between marmosets and humans.

The researchers performed comprehensive DNA methylation analyses of neurons from patients with bipolar disorder, and found that many genes were hypomethylated in patients, while genes important for neuronal function were hypermethylated. Differentially methylated regions in neurons were significantly enriched in genomic regions suggested by a genome-wide association study of bipolar disorder, indicating an association with genetic factors.

The researchers developed a fast and wide field-of-view two-photon microscopy with practically no optical aberrations. Combining high-performance large lenses and devices and a fast laser scanning mirror enables the recording of over 16,000 neurons in awake mice. Functional network analysis with single-cell resolution reveals the small-world behavior of the cortex.

This work develops an unsupervised learning scheme that extracts the most informative components for predicting future inputs, which is called PredPCA (predictive principal component analysis). We demonstrate that PredPCA can extract hidden features important for predicting previously unseen videos. This scheme is potentially useful for automated driving and medical diagnosis.

The researchers demonstrated that perampanel, an antiepileptic drug, inhibited the activity-dependent neuronal uptake of α-synuclein preformed fibrils via macropinocytosis and the subsequent development of α-synuclein inclusions in Parkinson’s disease models. Targeting neuronal activity with perampanel could represent a new therapeutic strategy for Parkinson’s disease.

In this article, the researchers established a species-wide method for deriving transgene-free iPSCs, and discovered primary colony-forming cells showed a neural stem cell-like profile, named induced neural stem cell-like cells (iNSLCs).