Neuroscience

Most social animals, humans included, organize themselves into hierarchies that guide individual behavior. For instance, if you’re reaching for the last piece of pizza at a party and you see another hand going for it at the same time, your next move probably depends both on how you feel and to whom the hand belongs. Your little sister—you might go ahead and grab the pizza. Your boss—you’re likely to step back and give up the slice. But if you’re hungry and feeling particularly confident, you might go for it. Professor Kay Tye, co-first authors Nancy Padilla-Coreano and Kanha Batra, and colleagues have made inroads in uncovering how mammalian brains encode social rank and use that information to shape our behaviors, such as whether to fight for that last pizza slice.

Professor Joseph Ecker and colleagues have developed a new genomic technology to simultaneously analyze the DNA, RNA and chromatin—a combination of DNA and protein—from a single cell. The method, which took five years to develop, is an important step forward for large collaborations where multiple teams are working simultaneously to classify thousands of new cell types. The new technology will help streamline analyses and provide an open-source cell catalog to better understand neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

For years, the brain has been thought of as a biological computer that processes information through traditional circuits, whereby data zips straight from one cell to another. While that model is still accurate, a new study led by Professor Thomas Albright and Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein shows that there’s also a second, very different way that the brain parses information: through the interactions of waves of neural activity. The findings will help researchers better understand how the brain processes information.