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How diurnal primates develop exploration-navigation strategy and how the physiology of primate hippocampus is shaped in navigation are not fully understood. Here authors show that marmosets adapted their navigation strategies to their diurnal ecological niche. Notably, marmoset hippocampal neurons are specialized for encoding combinations of view, head direction and place, and that theta oscillations are triggered by rapid head-gaze movements.

An optical technique is developed that extends the capabilities of fluorescent nanosensors into previously inaccessible ultradeep in vivo locations, including the brain, without the use of fibre optic or cranial window insertion.

In Drosophila, FC2 neurons signal a navigational goal, which is compared with the fly’s heading by PFL3 neurons to guide moment-to-moment steering.

The bacterium Proteus mirabilis natively forms a bullseye colony pattern by swarming. Doshi et al. engineered this bacterium to encode environmental inputs, including copper, into its pattern features, and decoded them with image processing and deep learning.

Information-seeking behavior in humans is often viewed as irrational rather than utility maximizing. Here the authors describe data obtained in Spring 2020 showing that participants’ concern about COVID-19 was related not only to their drive to seek information about the virus, but also to their curiosity about other more general topics.

Neuropil regions across the fly brain are activated by locomotion. Here, authors show that this movement-related activity involves most neurons in the dorsal fly brain, including genetically defined neurons with known, seemingly unrelated functions.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of connexin channels composed of connexin 46 and connexin 50 in an open-state reveal features that govern permselectivity and the location of mutated residues linked to herediatry cataracts.

Here, the authors show that beta oscillations in the frontal and parietal lobes of monkeys propagate as traveling waves. The strength of these signals increases after rewards, suggesting a role for traveling waves in memory for recent events.

Hox proteins are expressed in partially overlapping regions to inform development along the embryo’s head-tail axis. Here the authors analyse a cis regulatory module directly regulated by seven different Drosophila Hox proteins to uncover how different Hox class proteins differentially control its expression.

Mitragynine (MG) is an indole alkaloid from kratom plant that binds opioid receptors and as such presents a scaffold for the development of atypical opioid receptor modulators. Here, the authors report a synthetic method for selective functionalization of the C11 position of MG, and show that this position is essential for fine-tuning opioid receptor signaling efficacy.

Schizophrenia patients are impaired in attenuating responses to self-generated sensory input. Here, the authors reveal the same sensory deficit and reduced corollary discharge signaling in mice carrying a major genetic risk factor for schizophrenia.

The ASAP4 family of genetically encoded voltage indicators allows recording of action potentials and subthreshold activity with either one- or two-photon microscopy over extended periods of time.

The central amygdala inhibitory microcircuits mediate fear extinction by reversible, stimulus- and context-specific changes in neuronal responses. These alterations are absent when extinction is deficient and selective silencing of PKCδ neurons impairs fear extinction.

Curiosity is motivated by uncertainty and valence, but how uncertainty and valence are encoded in the brain remains poorly understood. Here, the authors show that parietal neurons are enhanced by both factors, but that they specifically predict visual information seeking based on uncertainty.

A neural circuit for implementing a coordinate transformation and 2D vector computation is described in Drosophila.

How animals learn to generalize from one context to another remains unresolved. Here, the authors show that the abstract representations that are thought to underlie this form of generalization emerge naturally in neural networks trained to perform multiple tasks.

High-density single-neuron recordings show diverse tuning for acoustic and phonetic features across layers in human auditory speech cortex.

Behaviors often consist of sequences of component actions. Cury and Axel identify distinct classes of sensory neurons that control the transitions between the components of egg laying in the fly that afford this behavior an adaptive flexibility.

Acute stress transiently disrupts reward-seeking behaviour and repeated stress exposure produces lasting anhedonia-like behaviour in rodents. Here, the authors show that stress triggers GABAergic activity in the ventral tegmental area which blunts reward-seeking behaviour in mice.

An improved, fully re-annotated Aedes aegypti genome assembly (AaegL5) provides insights into the sex-determining M locus, chemosensory systems that help mosquitoes to hunt humans and loci involved in insecticide resistance and will help to generate intervention strategies to fight this deadly disease vector.

A robotic pipeline is used to survey a library of mutations in a Drosphila gene enhancer, showing that most mutations altered gene expression and had widespread pleiotropic effects that are likely to constrain regulatory evolution.

A diverse collection of potent neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein have been isolated from five patients with severe COVID-19 and high serum neutralization titres.

The first known portal system in the mammalian brain was identified in 1933. Here the authors describe a new portal system between the capillary beds of the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus master clock and a circumventricular organ, enabling humoral signals to reach targets without dilution in the systemic circulation.

A neural circuit activated by the male pheromone, darcin, mediates a complex and variable array of innate and reinforced behaviours that may promote mate encounters and mate selection.

Using chronic neural recordings, the authors show that long-term stability in both skilled and natural behaviors is associated with stable single neuron activity patterns in relevant motor circuits.

By tracking the activity of CA1 neurons during associative learning, Biane, Ladow et al. reveal the distinct contribution of neurons along the dorsoventral axis of CA1 in the encoding and updating of task-related representations throughout learning.

The Drosophila egg-deposition motor programme is initiated once a rise-to-threshold process hits a threshold, and subthreshold variation in this process regulates the time spent considering options.

Carbo-Tano and colleagues investigate the mesencephalic locomotor region in larval zebrafish and its role in triggering forward locomotion by activating specific sets of hindbrain V2a reticulospinal neurons.

SCAPE 2.0 is a versatile imaging platform that enables real-time three-dimensional microscopy of cellular function and dynamic motion in living organisms at over 100 volumes per second with minimal photodamage, and high-throughput structural imaging in fixed, cleared and expanded samples.

Lean body mass is a highly heritable trait and is associated with various health conditions. Here, Kiel and colleagues perform a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for whole body lean body mass and find five novel genetic loci to be significantly associated.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is linked to environmental factors. Through quantitative epidemiology, this study ties 53 pesticides to PD. An innovative human stem cell platform revealed that 10 of these were directly toxic to human dopamine neurons.

Analysis of behaviour, physiology, anatomy and connectomics in Drosophila shows how direction-specific visual information is transformed onto downstream premotor networks and converted into appropriate motor responses.

Making a decision requires one to differentiate between choice options, committing to one and leaving the other behind. Here, the authors show that decision-making paradoxically binds options together, such that the outcome of the choice ends up changing the value of both the chosen and the unchosen options, in opposite directions.

The challenge of accurate particle picking in cryo-EM analysis is addressed with Topaz, a neural-network-based algorithm that shows advantages over other tools, especially in picking unusually shaped particles.

A theory of motor learning based on the principle of contextual inference reveals that adaptation can arise by both creating and updating memories and changing how existing memories are differentially expressed, and predicts evoked recovery and context-dependent single-trial learning.

How the brain computes the value of complex stimuli such as visual art remains poorly understood. Here, the authors use computational models and fMRI to show that this process involves an integration over low- and high-level features across visual, parietal, and frontal cortical areas.

Loss of excitatory synapses occur prior to the formation of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. Here the authors show in an animal model that the loss of synapses induced by amyloid-beta oligomers requires over-activation of a stress-response pathway inducing structural remodelling of mitochondria in dendrites of cortical and hippocampal neurons.

In a phase 2b study, inhibition of hepatic stearoyl-CoA desaturase in patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis was safe and tolerated; although reductions in liver fat were not significant, changes in liver enzymes and histology were observed.