Chopra and colleagues show that the hormone asprosin, independent of its effects on hypothalamic AgRP neurons, activates its cell surface receptor Ptprd on cerebellar Purkinje neurons to enhance thirst for maintenance of fluid homeostasis.

The authors identify reusable ‘dynamical motifs’ in artificial neural networks. These motifs enable flexible recombination of previously learned capabilities, promoting modular, compositional computation and rapid transfer learning. This discovery sheds light on the fundamental building blocks of intelligent behavior.

In nature, female mice, like males, display aggression and dominant hierarchy. This study in wild mice identifies oxytocin-expressing neurons as a hub governing these behaviors, influencing the degree of sexual dimorphism in social conflicts.

How aging influences peripheral immune cell infiltration and the role of these cells following traumatic injury of the CNS is unclear. Here, the authors show that aging transforms CNS-associated macrophages into regulators of immune cell trafficking after ischemic stroke, modulating neurological outcomes.

Ehret et al. uncover neural activity patterns in the prefrontal cortex that link sensory stimuli to learned behavioral responses by isolating interpretable activity patterns that are shared among mice performing the same task.

Liu et al. unraveled several hippocampal neural ensemble coding schemes that efficiently represent numerous daily experiences during sleep by prioritizing the most recent and earliest events, multiplexing co-representations and compressing day-long sequences.

Coordinated neuronal activity may mediate memory in hippocampal CA1. Here, the authors use an array of machine-learning classifiers to reveal how higher-order population dynamics and learning-induced spine plasticity are disrupted in amnestic mice.

Perineuronal nets stabilize synapses inhibiting synaptic plasticity. Here, the authors show that perineuronal nets act as a diffusion barrier facilitating astrocytic clearance of synaptically released ions and neurotransmitters.

Parks, Schneider et al. show that brain states like sleep and wake can be reliably detected from milliseconds of neural activity in local regions in mice. Regions can briefly switch states independently, coinciding with fleeting behavioral changes.

Dong et al. developed and validated κLight, δLight and µLight, a suite of genetically encoded opioid peptide sensors for probing opioid drugs and brain-region/circuit-specific opioid release in behaving animals.