Spectrum Autism Research

Kampff's do-it-yourself approach inspired a generation of neuroscientists.

The atlas also offers up molecular and cellular targets for new pain therapies.

Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs.

Simple behavioral assays—originally validated as drug-screening tools—fall short in studies that aim to unpack the psychedelic mechanism of action, so some behavioral neuroscientists are developing more nuanced tasks.

The comprehensive resource details data on microcephaly, polymicrogyria, epilepsy and intellectual disability from 352 people.

These guidelines can help researchers ensure the integrity of their work while accelerating progress on important scientific questions.

A growing list of medications—such as zuranolone for postpartum depression, suzetrigine for pain, and the gepants class of migraine medicines—exist because of insights from basic research.

Synchronized signals in non-neuronal retinal cells draw the tiny compartments of a fruit fly's compound eye into alignment during pupal development.

Four experts weigh in on how to establish ethical guardrails for research on the 3D neuron clusters as these models become ever more complex.

The dataset contains images of children's faces downloaded from websites about autism, which sparked concerns at Springer Nature about consent and reliability.

Generative artificial intelligence will offer a new way to see, simulate and hypothesize about how animals experience their worlds. In doing so, it could help bridge the long-standing gap between neural function and behavior.

Neuronal activity induced by the psychedelic drug strengthens inputs from sensory brain areas and weakens cortico-cortical recurrent loops.

Machine learning should not be a replacement for human judgment but rather help us embrace the various assumptions and interpretations that shape behavioral research.

The 2013 Nature paper by Mattia Rigotti and his colleagues revealed how mixed selectivity neurons—cells that are not selectively tuned to a stimulus—play a key role in cognition.

Cerebrospinal fluid shows brain-region-specific dynamics, a new high-resolution MRI approach reveals.

Some age-related changes in the brain and in behavior are not solely the result of cognitive decline but rather part of a larger adaptive process.

Many well-known perimenopause symptoms arise in the brain, but we still know little about the specific mechanisms at play. More research—in both animals and humans—is essential.

Research in primate brains has been essential for the development of brain-computer interfaces and artificial neural networks. New funding and policy changes put the future of such advances at risk.

Called U.S. Public Research Benefits, the database showcases the value of basic science in an easy and accessible format.

Eight researchers explain how they are using large language models to analyze the literature, brainstorm hypotheses and interact with complex datasets.

Adopting an engineering mindset will help the field focus its research priorities.

The findings add fuel to the long-running debate over how an imbalance in excitatory and inhibitory signaling contributes to the autism.

With lower-than-average article processing fees, and issues dedicated to topics important to the continent, the journal hopes to give African neuroscience research much-needed international visibility.

Bifurcations—an underexplored concept in neuroscience—can help explain how small differences in neural circuits give rise to entirely novel functions.

The biochemist, who died last month at age 92, was part of the first neurobiology department in the world and showed that gamma-aminobutyric acid is inhibitory.

Human-specific duplicates of SRGAP2 prolong cortical development by manipulating SYNGAP, an autism-linked protein that slows synaptic growth.

Nociceptors tamp down the production of reactive oxygen species in response to heat, chemical irritants or toxins.

In this 2006 Cell paper, Shigeo Takamori and his colleagues showcased the molecular machinery of synaptic vesicles in outstanding detail. Their work taught me that these aren't just passive containers for neurotransmitters but dynamic, precision-built nanomachines.

With an eye toward realism, the neuroscientist, who has a new study about bats out today, creates microcosms of the natural world to understand animal behavior.

Boys and girls may be vulnerable to different genetic changes, which could help explain why the condition is more common in boys despite linked variants appearing more often in girls.

Disrupting the astrocyte-neuronal dynamic in mice destabilizes their memory of fear conditioning.

A protective screen of spurious transcriptional activity enables each olfactory neuron to express exactly one out of hundreds of olfactory receptors.

A researcher's theory hangs muscle degeneration on a broken neural circuit.

We asked nine neuroscientists how they are using FlyWire data in their labs, how the connectome has transformed the field and what new tools they would like to see in the future.

Functional synapses between brain cells and cancer cells are key to the metastatic growth, according to new findings from two independent teams.

Despite the many psychedelics clinical trials underway, there is still much we don't know about how these drugs work. Preclinical studies represent our best viable avenue to answer these lingering questions.

Building reproducible systems across labs is possible, even in large-scale neuroscience projects. You just need rigor, collaboration and the willingness to look your own practices dead in the eye.

The mapping, which traces how the central nervous system interacts with the rest of the body, challenges the idea that behavior control is centralized.

Concerns include the administration's reliance on weak, correlational evidence rather than established research.

The traditional mechanistic framework must give way to a richer understanding of how brains actually generate behavior over time.

Friedemann Zenke's 2019 paper, and its related coding tutorial SpyTorch, made it possible to apply modern machine learning to spiking neural networks. The innovation reinvigorated the field.

The map of a comb jelly's aboral nerve net, which helps the animal orient and position itself within the water column, reveals a unique system for sensing the world and coordinating movement.

The notice, posted last week in Nature, follows a recent string of corrections to at least three other articles by Li-Huei Tsai's lab.

These partnerships accelerate neuroscience by enabling researchers to share resources and expertise, as well as generate more relevant and reproducible results. But new federal funding restrictions in the United States are putting such collaborations in jeopardy.

The new work, in mice missing the autism-linked gene CNTNAP2, suggests a mechanism to help explain the overlap between epilepsy and autism.

During waking hours, a specialized set of sleep neurons in the fly brain accumulates reactive oxygen species, which eventually trigger sleep to clean up and repair the damage they do.

Black In Neuro is launching a new program to help historically Black colleges and universities advance neuroscience research and education, focusing on cross-institutional collaboration, joint curriculum development and improved mentoring initiatives.

In 2025, the words we use to describe emotions matter, but their definitions are controversial. Here, I unpack the different positions in this space and the rationales behind them—and I invite 13 experts to chime in.

By contrast, varied doses of the same genes decrease or increase the odds of five other conditions, with distinct biological consequences, two new preprints show.

The networks are plastic, connect brain regions that aren't connected by neurons and may enable long-distance communication between astrocytes, a new preprint shows.

Efficiency isn't everything. The cognitive work of struggling with prose may be a crucial part of what drives scientific progress.