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The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task in mice.

Mapping the organization of excitatory inputs onto the dendritic spines of individual mouse visual cortex neurons reveals how inputs representing features from the extended visual scene are organized and establishes a computational unit suited to amplify contours and elongated edges.

Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

Inbreeding depression has been observed in many different species, but in humans a systematic analysis has been difficult so far. Here, analysing more than 1.3 million individuals, the authors show that a genomic inbreeding coefficient (FROH) is associated with disadvantageous outcomes in 32 out of 100 traits tested.

Dendritic spine morphogenesis is sensitive to experience-dependent plasticity, but whether or not experience-induced structural changes outlast the experience itself is unknown. This paper reveals that long-lived spine density increases in response to monocular deprivation that persist beyond the duration of time the eye was closed. Subsequent deprivation fails to induce further spine density increases, suggesting initial experience may provide a structural experience 'trace' that could be utilized in response to further functional shifts.

Experiments in mice show that a cortico-thalamic circuit generates prediction-error signals in primary visual cortex that amplify visual input that deviates from animals’ expectations.

A large genome-wide association study of more than 5 million individuals reveals that 12,111 single-nucleotide polymorphisms account for nearly all the heritability of height attributable to common genetic variants.

Behavioural experiments in mice demonstrate that GABAergic (γ-aminobutyric acid-expressing), glutamatergic and serotonergic neurons in the median raphe nucleus have distinct and complementary functions in regulating decision-making resulting in flexible behavioural strategies.

Current models of active vision emphasize the role of intracortical feedback projections. The authors report that thalamocortical projections, in particular from the higher order lateral posterior nucleus, provide an alternative pathway by which contextual sensory and motor information, as well as putative visuomotor error signals, are conveyed to primary visual cortex.

Using two-photon calcium imaging in vivo and intracellular recordings in vitro, the authors find that visual stimulation only weakly modifies coactivation patterns of inhibitory neurons, whereas excitatory neuron correlations are largely stimulus dependent.

Khan et al. simultaneously measured activity from excitatory cells and three classes of inhibitory interneurons in visual cortex and show that learning differentially shapes the stimulus selectivity and interactions of multiple cell classes.

Cortex morphology varies with age, cognitive function, and in neurological and psychiatric diseases. Here the authors report 160 genome-wide significant associations with thickness, surface area and volume of the total cortex and 34 cortical regions from a GWAS meta-analysis in 22,824 adults.

A study of mouse visual cortex relating patterns of excitatory synaptic connectivity to visual response properties of neighbouring neurons shows that, after eye opening, local connectivity reorganizes extensively: more connections form selectively between neurons with similar visual responses and connections are eliminated between visually unresponsive neurons, but the overall connectivity rate does not change.

Krisai et al. compare brain structure and cognitive function in elderly patients with and without atrial fibrillation using brain MRI and cognitive testing. They find that atrial fibrillation is associated with more brain lesions and lower cognitive function, but the cognitive impairment occurs primarily through direct effects of the arrhythmia rather than through brain damage.

Genome-wide association analyses based on whole-genome sequencing and imputation identify 40 new risk variants for colorectal cancer, including a strongly protective low-frequency variant at CHD1 and loci implicating signaling and immune function in disease etiology.

Noel et al. show aberrant updating of expectations in three distinct mouse models of autism spectrum disorder. Brain-wide neurophysiology data suggest this stems from excess units encoding deviations from prior mean and a lack of sensory prediction errors in frontal areas.

Lightning Pose is an efficient pose estimation approach that requires few labeled training data owing to its semi-supervised learning strategy and ensembling.

In colorectal cancer (CRC), finding loci associated with risk may give insight into disease aetiology. Here, the authors report a genome-wide association analysis in Europeans of 34,627 CRC cases and 71,379 controls, and find 31 new risk loci and 17 new risk SNPs at previously reported loci.

To study long-term changes in neuronal circuits at single-cell resolution, a Troponin C–based Ca²⁺ indicator protein has been reengineered to increase the signal strength. This allows repeated measurements, over days and weeks, of orientation selective neurons in mouse visual cortex. Hasan et al., also in this issue, describe the use of a similar sensor for recording neuronal activity in vivo.

Gram-positive bacteria can release signaling peptides that are ‘probed’ by intracellular receptors after being pumped into the cytoplasm. Here, Babel et al. show that these pump-probe networks can infer the fraction of signal-producing cells in a mixed population, and do not necessarily mediate typical quorum-sensing control.

In wild spotted hyenas, the gut microbiome is shaped by mucosal immunity. Mucosal immune measures have strong associations with specific taxa of bacteria, hookworms and fungi known to establish mutualistic, commensal and parasitic interactions.

An analysis of 16 health-related quantitative traits in approximately 350,000 individuals reveals statistically significant associations between genome-wide homozygosity and four complex traits (height, lung function, cognitive ability and educational attainment); in each case increased homozygosity associates with a decreased trait value, but no evidence was seen of an influence on blood pressure, cholesterol, or ten other cardio-metabolic traits.

Rupprecht et al. compiled a large database of simultaneous electrophysiological and calcium recordings from the same neurons. An algorithm (termed CASCADE) trained with this ground truth enables reliable spike inference without the need to tune parameters.

A modular architecture for managing and sharing electrophysiology, behavior, colony management and other data has been built to support individual laboratories or large consortia.

Exploring the relationship between population coupling and neuronal activity reveals that neighbouring neurons can differ in their coupling to the overall firing rate of the population, the circuitry of which may potentially help to explain the complex activity patterns in cortical populations.

In complex networks of the cerebral cortex, the majority of connections are weak and only a minority strong, but it is not known why; here the authors show that excitatory neurons in primary visual cortex follow a rule by which strong connections are sparse and occur between neurons with correlated responses to visual stimuli, whereas only weak connections link neurons with uncorrelated responses.