synaptic-biology

Understanding how molecular changes shape brain function and disease requires more than measuring genes in bulk tissue.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Published online: 20 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41583-026-01074-w Understanding how early life stress becomes biologically embedded remains a major challenge in neuroscience. In this Review, Maze and colleagues discuss recent advances in cell-type-specific epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying long-term stress susceptibility.

In 2024, Limei Zhang, Full Professor of Physiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico School of Medicine, received the ALBA-Elsevier Award Lecture on Brain Sciences. The award recognised her contributions to systems neuroscience and neuroendocrinology, particularly her research on the neuroendocrine and synaptic regulation of behaviour through vasopressin and other neuropeptide syste…

Specialized brain scans reveal that schizophrenia is linked to widespread loss of the synapses that connect brain cells, with the left side of the brain hit especially hard. The damage follows a surprisingly organized pattern tied to the brain’s chemistry and wiring. Researchers also identified a left frontal region that may serve as a starting point for the loss.

A new study out of the University of Delaware shows that fluctuations in estrogen influence the brain, helping reshape connections between neurons.

[Nature Genetics] Scientists developed a high-content screening to investigate how Alzheimer’s disease genetic risk factors may affect synaptic mechanisms in rat primary neuronal cultures.

[Cell Reports] Scientists identified pleiotrophin (Ptn) as a regulator of presynaptic development. Affinity purification-based proteomics shows that Ptn associates with heparan sulfate (HS)-modified neurexin1 in the brain through an HS-glycan-dependent mechanism.

The part played by synaptic plasticity in natural learning can be reassessed owing to the discovery of dormant neurons in the cortical layer-2 of large-brained mammals. Here, the recruitment of cortical columns that contain these quiescent cells is argued to underlie the lifelong building of long-term memories, albeit only during periods when cortical regions are segregated, while perception, cog…

If individual synapses were the sole key to holding onto memories, this sudden structural “demolition” should have erased everything the mice learned. Remarkably, it didn’t. Once the mice woke up and recovered, their memories were completely intact. The Power Clusters: The synapses connecting “memory-encoding” neurons (the specific cells storing the memory) weren’t randomly scattered. Instead, [&…

Memories can survive even after the brain temporarily loses more than half of its synaptic connections, according to a new mouse study, which challenges the long-held view that long-term memories depend on stable individual synapses.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 13 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02398-7 STARFISH, a method for visualizing endogenous mRNA translation, is used to show that tau is translated exclusively in neuronal dendrites and rapidly degraded by neuroproteasomes. Failure of this degradation leads to accumulation of tau aggregates.

Schizophrenia involves marked deficits in sensory-guided behavior, yet the behavioral consequences of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor hypofunction for auditory decision-making, and whether they differ by sex, remain unclear. We trained female and male rats on an operant auditory oddball task requiring responses to rare deviant tones (go context) while withholding responses to frequent standa…

Background: Psychosis is a complex neuropsychiatric state which can be induced by methamphetamine. How methamphetamine-associated psychosis (MAP) is perceived by those who experience it, and whether it increases or reduces motivation for recovery is unclear. Objective: Using qualitative methods, our study explored the relationships between MAP and subjective changes in methamphetamine use among i…

Background: Benzodiazepines and non-benzodiazepine hypnotics (Z-drugs) act at the benzodiazepine binding site of GABAA receptors but differ in their receptor subtype selectivity and behavioural profiles. Diazepam acts as a non-selective positive allosteric modulator of benzodiazepine-sensitive GABAA receptors, whereas zolpidem and indiplon display preferential affinity for α1-containing receptor …

Abstract The widespread and increasing prevalence of excess body mass represents a major public health concern and has been hypothesized to involve dysfunction of the dopaminergic reward system. However, a detailed, systems-level understanding of interactions between the dopamine system and body mass regulation in humans has been elusive. To address this knowledge gap, we employed positron emissi…

Behavioral flexibility is crucial to animal survival in dynamic environments, and a failure to update actions in response to recent outcomes is a hallmark of many neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the cellular and circuit mechanisms in the brain that support behavioral flexibility remain poorly understood. Forms of short-term plasticity such as synaptic facilitation have been theorized to tran…