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Now collected in a single volume for the first time, journalist Allan Jones selects his favorite columns from Uncut magazine's 'Stop me if you've heard this one before' feature. It covers the highs and lows (mostly lows) of being a music journalist in the 1970s and 1980s.

The mammalian cortex is a laminar structure containing many areas and cell types that are densely interconnected in complex ways, and for which generalizable principles of organization remain mostly unknown. Here we describe a major expansion of the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas resource 1 , involving around a thousand new tracer experiments in the cortex and its main satellite structure, the thalamus. We used Cre driver lines (mice expressing Cre recombinase) to comprehensively and selectively label brain-wide connections by layer and class of projection neuron. Through observations of axon termination patterns, we have derived a set of generalized anatomical rules to describe corticocortical, thalamocortical and corticothalamic projections. We have built a model to assign connection patterns between areas as either feedforward or feedback, and generated testable predictions of hierarchical positions for individual cortical and thalamic areas and for cortical network modules. Our results show that cell-class-specific connections are organized in a shallow hierarchy within the mouse corticothalamic network. Using mouse lines in which subsets of neurons are genetically labelled, the authors provide generalized anatomical rules for connections within and between the cortex and thalamus.

\"How does a young man who is losing his eyesight go about shaping a life? Such a dilemma is the stuff of \"pathography,\" a dreary genre of literature that emphasizes suffering and loss. This literary convention and the misconceptions that fuel it are challenged by Allan Jones in his autobiography, Beyond Vision - Going Blind, Inner Seeing, and the Nature of the Self. Jones was Canada's first blind diplomat, and his vivid account of life and work in Tokyo, New Delhi and Ottawa is a testament to the blind person's native capacity for innovation and practical adjustment. But the deeper message of Beyond Vision is more radical and consequential: the self - the real self that is normally veiled - does not go blind. The deep self stands entirely apart from the experience of sightedness or blindness, as a centre of stable equanimity. This is what the author discovered through his study and assimilation of Indian Vedantic philosophy. Jones briefly describes the basic features of Advaita Vedanta, and identifies startling findings of contemporary science that are consonant with the Advaitic view of world and self. He then outlines practical applications of Advaita, for example the mindfulness practice that allowed him to retain his white cane mobility skills despite chronic and untreatable spinal and muscular pain. Beyond Vision is an intimate, many-sided personal and family biography. But the dominant feature of this book is the way the world changed out of all recognition, with the author as its fascinated explorer and laborialist.\"-- Provided by publisher.

This Resource paper describes a set of five new reporter mice, derived from Rosa26, driving Cre-dependent strong and ubiquitous expression of fluorescent proteins. In particular, the new mice show clear and specific expression patterns in the adult brain. The mice are available through Jackson Laboratories, and growing expression datasets can be accessed at http://transgenicmouse.alleninstitute.org/ . The Cre/lox system is widely used in mice to achieve cell-type-specific gene expression. However, a strong and universally responding system to express genes under Cre control is still lacking. We have generated a set of Cre reporter mice with strong, ubiquitous expression of fluorescent proteins of different spectra. The robust native fluorescence of these reporters enables direct visualization of fine dendritic structures and axonal projections of the labeled neurons, which is useful in mapping neuronal circuitry, imaging and tracking specific cell populations in vivo . Using these reporters and a high-throughput in situ hybridization platform, we are systematically profiling Cre-directed gene expression throughout the mouse brain in several Cre-driver lines, including new Cre lines targeting different cell types in the cortex. Our expression data are displayed in a public online database to help researchers assess the utility of various Cre-driver lines for cell-type-specific genetic manipulation.

Hedgehogs Trundle and Esmeralda, along with their new friend Jack Nimble, sail out into the Sundered Lands to find Esmeralda's aunt, who they hope will help them unravel the clues to find the next of the six crowns.

This study describes the generation of knock-in mouse lines that express optogenetic activators or silencers in a CRE recombinase–dependent manner, and demonstrates the reliability and utility of these tools with in vivo and ex vivo light-induced activation and silencing of neuronal activity. Cell type–specific expression of optogenetic molecules allows temporally precise manipulation of targeted neuronal activity. Here we present a toolbox of four knock-in mouse lines engineered for strong, Cre-dependent expression of channelrhodopsins ChR2-tdTomato and ChR2-EYFP, halorhodopsin eNpHR3.0 and archaerhodopsin Arch-ER2. All four transgenes mediated Cre-dependent, robust activation or silencing of cortical pyramidal neurons in vitro and in vivo upon light stimulation, with ChR2-EYFP and Arch-ER2 demonstrating light sensitivity approaching that of in utero or virally transduced neurons. We further show specific photoactivation of parvalbumin-positive interneurons in behaving ChR2-EYFP reporter mice. The robust, consistent and inducible nature of our ChR2 mice represents a significant advance over previous lines, and the Arch-ER2 and eNpHR3.0 mice are to our knowledge the first demonstration of successful conditional transgenic optogenetic silencing. When combined with the hundreds of available Cre driver lines, this optimized toolbox of reporter mice will enable widespread investigations of neural circuit function with unprecedented reliability and accuracy.

Trundle Boldoak's simple life as the town lamplighter is turned upside-down the night he meets Esmeralda, a Roamany hedgehog, who whisks him away on a quest to find six fabled crowns and fulfill his role in an ancient prophecy.

Elucidating the cellular architecture of the human cerebral cortex is central to understanding our cognitive abilities and susceptibility to disease. Here we used single-nucleus RNA-sequencing analysis to perform a comprehensive study of cell types in the middle temporal gyrus of human cortex. We identified a highly diverse set of excitatory and inhibitory neuron types that are mostly sparse, with excitatory types being less layer-restricted than expected. Comparison to similar mouse cortex single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets revealed a surprisingly well-conserved cellular architecture that enables matching of homologous types and predictions of properties of human cell types. Despite this general conservation, we also found extensive differences between homologous human and mouse cell types, including marked alterations in proportions, laminar distributions, gene expression and morphology. These species-specific features emphasize the importance of directly studying human brain. RNA-sequencing analysis of cells in the human cortex enabled identification of diverse cell types, revealing well-conserved architecture and homologous cell types as well as extensive differences when compared with datasets covering the analogous region of the mouse brain.

Trundle, Esmeralda, and Jack race across the skies of the Sundered Lands in search of the nest of the wondrous phoenix, where they hope to find the Crown of Fire, third of the six lost crowns of the ancient Badger Lords, joining a battle in the skies over Swallowhaven on the way.

Comprehensive knowledge of the brain’s wiring diagram is fundamental for understanding how the nervous system processes information at both local and global scales. However, with the singular exception of the C. elegans microscale connectome, there are no complete connectivity data sets in other species. Here we report a brain-wide, cellular-level, mesoscale connectome for the mouse. The Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas uses enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP)-expressing adeno-associated viral vectors to trace axonal projections from defined regions and cell types, and high-throughput serial two-photon tomography to image the EGFP-labelled axons throughout the brain. This systematic and standardized approach allows spatial registration of individual experiments into a common three dimensional (3D) reference space, resulting in a whole-brain connectivity matrix. A computational model yields insights into connectional strength distribution, symmetry and other network properties. Virtual tractography illustrates 3D topography among interconnected regions. Cortico-thalamic pathway analysis demonstrates segregation and integration of parallel pathways. The Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas is a freely available, foundational resource for structural and functional investigations into the neural circuits that support behavioural and cognitive processes in health and disease. In mouse, an axonal connectivity map showing the wiring patterns across the entire brain has been created using an EGFP-expressing adeno-associated virus tracing technique, providing the first such whole-brain map for a vertebrate species. New whole-brain mapping resources With President Barack Obama's BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative now entering year two, this issue of Nature presents two landmark papers that mobilize 'big science' resources to the cause. Hongkui Zeng and colleagues present the first brain-wide, mesoscale connectome for a mammalian species — the laboratory mouse — based on cell-type-specific tracing of axonal projections. The wiring diagram of a complete nervous system has long been available for a small roundworm, but neuronal connectivity data for larger animals has been patchy until now. The new three-dimensional Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas is a whole-brain connectivity matrix that will provide insights into how brain regions communicate. Much of the data generated in this project will be of relevance to investigations of neural networks in humans and should help to further our understanding of human brain connectivity and its involvement in brain disorders. In a separate report Ed Lein and colleagues present a transcriptional atlas of the mid-gestational human brain at high spatial resolution, based on laser microdissection and DNA microarray technology. The structure and function of the human brain is largely determined by prenatal transcriptional processes that initiate gene expression, but our understanding of the developing brain has been limited. The new data set reveals transcriptional signatures for developmental processes associated with the massive expansion of neocortex during human evolution, and suggests new cortical germinal zones or postmitotic neurons as sites of dynamic expression for many genes associated with neurological or psychiatric disorders.