Nature Neuroscience

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02309-w Decades of male bias in animal research have left female biology critically understudied. Prematurely phasing out animal research would lock this inequity into future biomedicine, disproportionately harming women.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02286-0 Liu et al. show in mice that microglia are recruited to the soma and dendritic processes of fear engram neurons during extinction learning and that they weaken fear memories by temporarily silencing and remodeling the engram neurons.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02278-0 Stereotyped dendritic arbors arise from stochastic growth and selective stabilization of dendritic branches. Two pools of guidance receptor are required. Ligand-free receptors drive stochastic growth while ligand-bound receptors stabilize branches.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 01 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02290-4 Context-dependent behavior selects actions according to task demands. Using direct brain recordings in humans, Binish et al. uncover how coordinated population activity efficiently channels information from prefrontal to motor cortex.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 30 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02258-4 High-density single-neuron recordings in patients with epilepsy revealed interictal discharges are generated by structured laminar circuits. These circuits overlapped with cognitive circuits and could predict discharges up to 1 s in advance.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 30 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02263-7 The authors identify glucose-derived conversion of citrate to acetyl-CoA upstream of histone acetylation as modulating the regional dynamics of oligodendrocyte progenitors, with extranuclear acetyl-CoA from other sources being used for myelination.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 29 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02280-6 How the brain organizes the retrieval of old and new memories remains unknown. Kim et al. identify a septo−entorhinal GABAergic pathway that controls flexible switching between episodic memories during memory retrieval to enable memory updating.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02231-1 Related memories are sometimes encoded in overlapping neurons. The authors show that the prefrontal cortex controls this type of memory organization in the hippocampus through direct projections to the medial entorhinal cortex.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02253-9 The authors investigate the transcriptomic and connectivity organization of the basal ganglia and parafascicular nucleus. The analyses suggest that combinatorial gene expression underlies the modular and cell-type-specific basal ganglia input–output networks.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 27 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02279-z Using two-photon imaging in mice, Garborg et al. show that brain movement within the skull is driven by abdominal muscle contractions through mechanical coupling with the abdomen. Simulations suggest that this brain motion could contribute to cerebrospinal fluid circulation.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 27 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02262-8 The authors developed Cheese3D, a hardware–software framework for precise and sensitive measurement of whole-face movements in mice that enables quantitative inference of neural and physiological processes.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 24 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02284-2 Addendum: Neural anticipation of virtual infection triggers an immune response

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 24 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02312-1 Author Correction: Astrocytic Sox9 overexpression in Alzheimer’s disease mouse models promotes Aβ plaque phagocytosis and preserves cognitive function

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 24 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02247-7 By studying 23 neurodevelopmental disorder genes across model systems and brain cell types, the authors uncovered shared downstream effects that converge on synaptic biology, epigenetic regulation and mitochondrial function.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 23 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02288-y A recent study by Epp et al. uses advanced, quantitative functional MRI measures to demonstrate that the ‘canonical’ interpretation of blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) — that increases and decreases in brain activation are accompanied by corresponding changes in blood flow and oxygen…

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 23 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02260-w The authors reveal entorhinal cortex dopaminergic and behavioral dysfunction in Alzheimer’s model mice, suggesting the possibility that entorhinal dopamine loss may contribute to aspects of Alzheimer’s disease.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 21 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02272-6 Zou et al. reveal a key difference between human brains and large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategically grouping words into phrases.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 21 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02277-1 This Review describes how an approach that starts from genetic changes under selection during human evolution and integrates comparative and functional studies can reveal adaptive phenotypes across different evolutionary timescales.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02256-6 The authors characterized the spatial origin of Drosophila medulla neurons, completing their previous characterization of the temporal and Notch origins of these neurons and allowing them to correlate patterning of progenitors and neuronal type-specific features.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 16 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02265-5 Integrating spatial and single-cell data from 100 patients, the authors define conserved cellular communities and communications in glioblastoma, revealing distinct mesenchymal-like tumor subtypes and predominant neurogliomal synapses that shape tumor progression.