Featured Story:
Breeding for Skull Shape Changes the Dog Brain
December 10, 2024
Sophie Barton shares new research investigating how humans may have unwittingly altered the brain morphology of domestic dogs through selective breeding for head shape. Dogs with extreme head shapes show widespread reductions in gray matter volume across the brain.
Community Stories
October 10, 2024
Clifford Woolf shares a perspectives piece about what scientists can learn from the opioid crisis as they develop new pain treatments. The piece is part of a special Nature Outlook edition on pain.
September 9, 2024
Tari Tan shares an article she has written in the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education together with colleagues from three other institutions, providing a general overview of the neuroscience PhD admissions landscape, followed by a deeper dive into two specific examples, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Harvard and discussion of training programs that increase participation and diversity in neuroscience.
August 27, 2024
A lot is unknown about how brain circuits develop and mature in babies and toddlers. Carol Wilkinson shares new data on developmental trajectories of EEG activity from 0-3 years—revealing age-dependent, nonlinear changes in periodic alpha and beta brain waves that are suggestive of distinct milestones in circuit maturation.
Original article in: Nature Communications >
August 1, 2024
Complement proteins are known to mediate the pruning of synapses by microglia. In new work with implications for our understanding of schizophrenia, Krishna K. Narayanan, Matthew L Baum, Matthew Johnson, and Beth Stevens, and colleagues at Boston Children's Hospital, find that a neuronal protein called CSDM1 opposes the deposition of complement proteins on synapses, making them less vulnerable to engulfment by microglia.
Original article in: Nature Communications >
In the News
November 22, 2024
New research from Christopher Walsh and colleagues, co-first authors Eduardo A Maury, Attila Jones, and Vladimir Seplyarskiy, suggests that distinctive patterns of non-inherited (somatic) mutations are important contributors to schizophrenia. These mutations appear to have occurred as the brain was forming and affect just a portion of its neurons.
Original article in: Science >
November 22, 2024
New research from David Corey and colleagues, first author Maryna V Ivanchenko, delivered a corrected version of the faulty gene that causes Usher syndrome — PCDH15 — and was able to restore hearing in mouse models and also showed potential in retinal organoids and nonhuman primates for improving vision.
Original article in: Journal of Clinical Investigation >
November 22, 2024
Harvard Magazine profiles Harvard alumni Craig Mermel and Ben Rapoport, who twenty years after meeting at HMS, are at the leading edge of efforts to use minimally invasive neural implants to improve human health.
Original article in: Journal of Clinical Investigation >
Awards & Honors
December 19, 2024
The prize recognizes researchers for outstanding discoveries and seminal insights in the broad field of neuroscience.
November 22, 2024
Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.
Banner Image:
Spiral ganglion neuron density. Image courtesy of Isle Bastille (Lab of Lisa Goodrich, Harvard Medical School).