Lacava et al. characterize a descending vestibulospinal pathway originating from the spinal vestibular nucleus that targets spinal segments controlling tail muscles in mice. Activation of this pathway...

To identify fundamental neuroscientific principles that generalize across species, neuroscientists must frame their research through an evolutionary lens.

This issue of Neuron, with accompanying papers in Cell, Cell Genomics, Cell Reports, and Cell Reports Methods, contains studies describing methods for access to neuronal and non-neuronal cell types wi...

The cerebellar vermis plays an essential role in maintaining posture and balance by integrating sensory inputs from multiple modalities to effectively coordinate movement. By transforming convergent s...

Contribute to oist/Physics-of-Behavior-Tutorials development by creating an account on GitHub.

There can be surprising differences between what neurons do and what neurons cause

Anyone who has ever squirmed through a dental cleaning can tell you how sensitive teeth can be. This sensitivity gives important feedback about temperature, pressure—and yes, pain—as we bite and chew ...

A one day hands-on workshop on the use of the famous DeepLabCut software to analyze videos of animal behavior, led by Drs. Mackenzie and Alexander Mathis. Participants will be helped to pre-install th...

Understanding how stimuli from the sensory periphery are progressively reformatted to yield useful representations is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. In olfaction, assessing odor concentration is key for many behaviors, such as tracking and navigation. Initially, as odor concentration increases, the average response of first-order sensory neurons also increases. However, the average response of second-order neurons remains flat with increasing concentration – a transformation that is believed to help with concentration-invariant odor identification, but that seemingly discards concentration information before it could be sent to higher brain regions. By combining neural data analyses from diverse species with computational modeling, we propose strategies by which second-order neurons preserve concentration information, despite flat mean responses at the population level. We find that individual second-order neurons have diverse concentration response curves that are unique to each odorant — some neurons respond more with higher concentration and others respond less — and together this diversity generates distinct combinatorial representations for different concentrations. We show that this encoding scheme can be recapitulated using a circuit computation, called divisive normalization, and we derive sufficient conditions for this diversity to emerge. We then discuss two mechanisms (spike rate vs. timing based) by which higher order brain regions may decode odor concentration from the reformatted representations. Since vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems likely evolved independently, our findings suggest that evolution converged on similar algorithmic solutions despite stark differences in neural circuit architectures. Finally, in land vertebrates a parallel olfactory pathway has evolved whose second-order neurons do not exhibit such diverse response curves; rather neurons in this pathway represent concentration information in a more monotonic fashion on average, potentially allowing for easier odor localization and identification at the expense of increased energy use. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

The long structures seen in manta rays and their relatives function as an early warning system, rather than a defensive weapon.

Rhythmic motor behaviors are generated by neural networks termed central pattern generators (CPGs). Although locomotor CPGs have been extensively characterized, it remains unknown how the neuronal pop...

Meet 10 neuroscientists bringing model diversity back with the funky animals they study.