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Higher cognition may require the globally coordinated integration of specialized brain regions into functional networks. A collection of structural cortical hubs—referred to as the rich club—has been hypothesized to support task-specific functional integration. In the present paper, we use a whole-cortex model to estimate directed interactions between 68 cortical regions from functional magnetic resonance imaging activity for four different tasks (reflecting different cognitive domains) and resting state. We analyze the state-dependent input and output effective connectivity (EC) of the structural rich club and relate these to whole-cortex dynamics and network reconfigurations. We find that the cortical rich club exhibits an increase in outgoing EC during task performance as compared with rest while incoming connectivity remains constant. Increased outgoing connectivity targets a sparse set of peripheral regions with specific regions strongly overlapping between tasks. At the same time, community detection analyses reveal massive reorganizations of interactions among peripheral regions, including those serving as target of increased rich club output. This suggests that while peripheral regions may play a role in several tasks, their concrete interplay might nonetheless be task-specific. Furthermore, we observe that whole-cortex dynamics are faster during task as compared with rest. The decoupling effects usually accompanying faster dynamics appear to be counteracted by the increased rich club outgoing EC. Together our findings speak to a gating mechanism of the rich club that supports fast-paced information exchange among relevant peripheral regions in a task-specific and goal-directed fashion, while constantly listening to the whole network. DATA_TASK_3DMOV_HP_CSF_WDBriefly, data comes from five functional runs consisting of a resting-state measurement (eyes closed), four individual task measurements including a visual n-back (n=2) task (Kirchner, 1958), the Eriksen flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974), a mental rotation task (Shepard & Metzler, 1971), and a verbal odd-man-out task (Flowers & Robertson, 1985). All runs comprise 192 data points with tasks being continuously performed during this period. For the n-back and flanker task, stimuli were presented at a rate of 0.5 Hz; for the mental rotation and odd-man out tasks they were presented at a rate of 0.25 Hz. Task sequence was counterbalanced across participants with the exception that the resting state functional run was always acquired first to prevent carry-over effects (Grigg & Grady, 2010). The data were acquired using a 3 Tesla Siemens Prisma Fit (upgraded Tim Trio) scanner and a 64-channel head coil. Initial preprocessing was performed using BrainVoyager QX (v2.6; Brain Innovation, Maastricht, the Netherlands). This includes slice scan time correction, 3D-motion correction, high-pass filtering with a frequency cutoff of .01 Hz, and registration of functional and anatomical images. Subsequently, using MATLAB (2013a, The MathWorks,Natick, MA), signals were cleaned by performing wavelet despiking (Patel & Bullmore, 2015) and regressing out a global noise signal given by the first principal component of signals observed within the cerebrospinal fluid of the ventricles. Next, voxels were uniquely assigned to one of the 68 cortical ROIs specified by the DK atlas and an average BOLD time-series was computed for each region as the mean time-series over all voxels of that region.

A 53-year-old man with a recent history of left temporal lobe hemorrhage presented with weakness of left upper limb for 4 days. Paragonimus eggs were detected in patient's sputum. Work up revealed paragonimiasis, a lung fluke worm infection endemic to East Africa, West Africa and South America which rarely involves in brain. Characteristic tunnel sign was visualized on brain MRI. Notably, susceptibility-weighted imaging revealed a migratory pattern of the parasite from the left temporal lobe to the right parietal lobe and resultant patchy hemorrhage. Treatment with praziquantel resulted in favorable outcome without residual deficits.

In most animals, the brain makes behavioral decisions that are transmitted by descending neurons to the nerve cord circuitry that produces behaviors. In insects, only a few descending neurons have been associated with specific behaviors. To explore how descending neurons control an insect's movements, we developed a novel method to systematically assay the behavioral effects of activating individual neurons on freely behaving terrestrial D. melanogaster. We calculated a two-dimensional representation of the entire behavior space explored by these flies and we associated descending neurons with specific behaviors by identifying regions of this space that were visited with increased frequency during optogenetic activation. Applying this approach across a large collection of descending neurons, we found that (1) activation of most of the descending neurons drove stereotyped behaviors, (2) in many cases multiple descending neurons activated similar behaviors, and (3) optogenetically-activated behaviors were often dependent on the behavioral state prior to activation. Movies of optogenetically activated split-Gal4 linesEach movie contains 1 second before and after optogenetic stimulation for all experimental (retinal +) and control (retinal -) flies for all stimulation trials.opto_movies.zip

Attending to a task-relevant location changes how neural activity oscillates in the alpha band (8–13Hz) in posterior visual cortical areas. However, a clear understanding of the relationships between top-down attention, changes in alpha oscillations in visual cortex, and attention performance are still poorly understood. Here, we tested the degree to which the posterior alpha power tracked the locus of attention, the distribution of attention, and how well the topography of alpha could predict the locus of attention. We recorded magnetoencephalographic (MEG) data while subjects performed an attention demanding visual discrimination task that dissociated the direction of attention from the direction of a saccade to indicate choice. On some trials, an endogenous cue predicted the target’s location, while on others it contained no spatial information. When the target’s location was cued, alpha power decreased in sensors over occipital cortex contralateral to the attended visual field. When the cue did not predict the target’s location, alpha power again decreased in sensors over occipital cortex, but bilaterally, and increased in sensors over frontal cortex. Thus, the distribution and the topography of alpha reliably indicated the locus of covert attention. Together, these results suggest that alpha synchronization reflects changes in the excitability of populations of neurons whose receptive fields match the locus of attention. This is consistent with the hypothesis that alpha oscillations reflect the neural mechanisms by which top-down control of attention biases information processing and modulate the activity of neurons in visual cortex. IkkaiDataUpload

Ocean acidification is perceived to be a major threat for many calcifying organisms, including scleractinian corals. Here we investigate (1) whether past exposure to low pH environments associated with CO2 vents could increase corals tolerance to low pH and (2) whether zooxanthellate corals are more tolerant to low pH than azooxanthellate corals. To test these hypotheses, two Mediterranean colonial corals Cladocora caespitosa (zooxanthellate) and Astroides calycularis (azooxanthellate) were collected from CO2 vents and reference sites and incubated in the laboratory under present-day (pH on the total scale, pHT 8.07) and low pH conditions (pHT 7.70). Rates of net calcification, dark respiration and photosynthesis were monitored during a six-month experiment. Monthly net calcification was assessed every 27 to 35 d using the buoyant weight technique, whereas light and dark net calcification was estimated using the alkalinity anomaly technique during 1 h incubations. Neither species showed any change in net calcification rates, respiration, and photosynthesis regardless of their environmental history, pH treatment and trophic strategy. Our results indicate that C. caespitosa and A. calycularis could tolerate future ocean acidification conditions for at least 6 months. These results will aid in predicting species' future responses to ocean acidification, and thus improve the management and conservation of Mediterranean corals. In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2021) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2022-04-11.

A large brain is a defining feature of modern humans, yet there is no consensus regarding the patterns, rates, and processes involved in hominin brain size evolution. We use a reliable proxy for brain size in fossils, endocranial volume (ECV), to better understand how brain size evolved at both clade- and lineage-level scales. For the hominin clade overall, the dominant signal is consistent with a gradual increase in brain size. This gradual trend appears to have been generated primarily by processes operating within hypothesized lineages – 64% or 88% depending on whether one uses a more or less speciose taxonomy, respectively. These processes were supplemented by the appearance in the fossil record of larger-brained Homo species and the subsequent disappearance of smaller-brained Australopithecus and Paranthropus taxa. When the estimated rate of within-lineage ECV increase is compared to an exponential model that operationalizes generation-scale evolutionary processes, it suggests that the observed data were the result of episodes of directional selection interspersed with periods of stasis and/or drift; all of this occurs on too fine a time scale to be resolved by the current human fossil record, thus producing apparent gradual trends within lineages. Our findings provide a quantitative basis for developing and testing scale-explicit hypotheses about the factors that led brain size to increase during hominin evolution. Appendix S1Supplementary methods, results, figures, and tables for the analysis.Du et al 2018 revised Appendix S1 R2_ESM_FINAL changes accepted.docxTable S1Excel spreadsheet with the raw data used for all analyses. Each row is a separate specimen along with its ID. Columns include the “lumper’s” and “splitter’s” taxonomy used in the random effects ANOVA to get inter-observer error (“lump.taxon” and “split.taxon”), the less and more speciose lineages used in the lower-taxonomic additive partitioning analyses (“lump.part” and “split.part”), region where each specimen comes from which aided in the allocation of specimens to lineages (“region”), grade for coding points in fig. 2 (“grade”), which specimens were excluded for the damaged specimens sensitivity analysis (“reliab.sens”), ECV replicate measurements from different researchers (“ecv1” to “ecv6”), and the various dates for each specimen (“min.date”, “max.date”, “mean.date”, and “sd.date”) and their respective age error distribution (“date.dist”).ProcB SI ECV dataset FINAL.xlsxR scriptR script for (1) running variance partitioning analyses to get inter-observer endocranial volume (ECV) error, (2) fitting evolutionary mode models to the hominin clade-level ECV data using the R package "paleoTS", (3) calculating R2 and model parameters for the gradualism model, and (4) running the lower taxonomic level additive partitioning analyses.Du et al R script_ESM.txt

Background: Recent reviews have highlighted the potential use of blood‐based methylation biomarkers as diagnostic and prognostic tools of current and future alcohol use and addiction. Due to the substantial overlap that often exists between methylation patterns across different tissues, including blood and brain, blood‐based methylation may track methylation changes in brain; however, little work has explored the overlap in alcohol‐related methylation in these tissues. Methods: To study the effects of alcohol on the brain methylome and identify possible biomarkers of these changes in blood, we performed a methylome‐wide association study in brain and blood from 40 male DBA/2J mice that received either an acute ethanol (EtOH) or saline intraperitoneal injection. To investigate all 22 million CpGs in the mouse genome, we enriched for the methylated genomic fraction using methyl‐CpG binding domain (MBD) protein capture followed by next‐generation sequencing (MBD‐seq). We performed association tests in blood and brain separately followed by enrichment testing to determine whether there was overlapping alcohol‐related methylation in the 2 tissues. Results: The top result for brain was a CpG located in an intron of Ttc39b (p = 5.65 × 10−08), and for blood, the top result was located in Espnl (p = 5.11 × 10−08). Analyses implicated pathways involved in inflammation and neuronal differentiation, such as CXCR4, IL‐7, and Wnt signaling. Enrichment tests indicated significant overlap among the top results in brain and blood. Pathway analyses of the overlapping genes converge on MAPKinase signaling (p = 5.6 × 10−05) which plays a central role in acute and chronic responses to alcohol and glutamate receptor pathways, which can regulate neuroplastic changes underlying addictive behavior. Conclusions: Overall, we have shown some methylation changes in brain and blood after acute EtOH administration and that the changes in blood partly mirror the changes in brain suggesting the potential for DNA methylation in blood to be biomarkers of alcohol use. READMECpG LocationsContains RaMWAS formatted files of CpG locationsCpG_locations.zipPhenotype FileContains phenotype data used in association analyses. Please see README file for data packets for description of variables.phenotype_file.txtCoverageContains RaMWAS formatted coverage (i.e., CpG score) files for each CpGcoverage.tar.gz

Male, C57BL/6J mice (Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME, USA; 000664) were seven-weeks old at the start of all studies. CD-1 retired male breeders (Charles Rivers, age 3 to 6 months upon arrival) were used as aggressors. All mice were singly housed on shaved, pine bedding upon arrival, maintained on a 12:12 L:D lighting cycle for the remainder of the study and randomly assigned to treatment groups. Food and water were available ad libitum. All procedures involving animals received prior approval from the Morehouse School of Medicine Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (approved protocol 21-02). Surgery: EEG and LFP electrodes. Electroencephalography (EEG): EEG and Electromyography (EMG) electrodes were implanted in isoflurane (1.5–3%) anesthetized mice. Carprofen was given post operatively for two days. A prefabricated head mount (Pinnacle Technology Inc., Lawrence, KS) was used to position three stainless-steel epidural screw electrodes. The first electrode (frontal—located over the frontal cortex) was placed 1.5 mm anterior to bregma and 1.5 mm lateral to the central suture, whereas the second two electrodes (interparietal—located over the visual cortex and common reference) were placed 2.5 mm posterior to bregma and 1.5 mm on either side of the central suture. The resulting two leads (frontal–interparietal and interparietal–interparietal) were referenced contralaterally. A fourth screw served as a ground. Electrical continuity between the screw electrode and head mount was aided by silver epoxy. EMG activity was monitored using stainless-steel Teflon-coated wires that were inserted bilaterally into the nuchal muscle. The head mount (integrated 2 × 3 pin socket array) was secured to the skull with dental acrylic. Mice were allowed to recover for at least 14 days before sleep recording. Resilience, the ability to overcome stressful conditions, is found in most mammals and varies significantly among individuals. A lack of resilience can lead to the development of neuropsychiatric and sleep disorders, often within the same individual. Despite extensive research into the brain mechanisms causing maladaptive behavioral-responses to stress, it is not clear why some individuals exhibit resilience. To examine if sleep has a determinative role in maladaptive behavioral-response to social stress, we investigated individual variations in resilience using a social-defeat model for male mice. Our results reveal a direct, causal relationship between sleep amount and resilience—demonstrating that sleep increases after social-defeat stress only occur in resilient mice. Further, we found that within the prefrontal cortex, a regulator of maladaptive responses to stress, pre-existing differences in sleep regulation predict resilience. Overall, these results demonstrate that increased NREM sleep, mediated cortically, is an active response to social-defeat stress that is both necessary and sufficient for promoting resilience. They also show that differences in resilience are strongly correlated with inter-individual variability in sleep regulation.