Neuroscience research has evolved to generate increasingly large and complex experimental data sets, and advanced data science tools are taking on central roles in neuroscience research. Neurodata Without Borders (NWB), a standard language for neurophysiology data, has recently emerged as a powerful solution for data management, analysis, and sharing. We here discuss our labs’ efforts to implement NWB data science pipelines. We describe general principles and specific use cases that illustrate successes, challenges, and non-trivial decisions in software engineering. We hope that our experience can provide guidance for the neuroscience community and help bridge the gap between experimental neuroscience and data science. Key takeaways from this article are that (1) standardization with NWB requires non-trivial design choices; (2) the general practice of standardization in the lab promotes data awareness and literacy, and improves transparency, rigor, and reproducibility in our science; (

Basolateral Amygdala Circuits for Fear Depend on Context Joanna Yau, Amy Li, Lauren Abdallah, Leszek Lisowski, and Gavan McNally (see article e0857242024) In this issue, neuroscientists continue to illuminate the context dependence of circuit activation. Yau et al. investigated appetitive and aversive basolateral amygdala (BLA) circuits using photometry recordings in rats. Rats learned to associate a sound with a footshock in two contexts: a neutral environment or an environment in which they could lever press for a food reward. …

Sleep May Enhance Motor Recovery during Rehabilitation Agustin Benjamin Ezequiel Solano, Gonzalo Lerner, Guillermina Griffa, Alvaro Deleglise, Pedro Caffaro et al. (see article e0325242024) Sleep enhances how well we retain autobiographical memories, such as a pleasant memory of riding your bike with a friend. But its role in how well we retain unconscious memories, like the act of riding a bike, is disputed. In this issue, Solano et al. investigated how sleep contributes to an aspect of motor skill …

The cerebral cortex contains multiple, distinct areas that individually perform specific computations. A particular strength of the cortex is the communication of signals between cortical areas that allows the outputs of these compartmentalized computations to influence and build on each other, thereby dramatically increasing the processing power of the cortex and its role in sensation, action, and cognition. Determining how the cortex communicates signals between individual areas is, therefore, critical for understanding cortical function. Historically, corticocortical communication was thought to occur exclusively by direct anatomical connections between areas that often sequentially linked cortical areas in a hierarchical fashion. More recently, anatomical, physiological, and behavioral evidence is accumulating indicating a role for the higher-order thalamus in corticocortical communication. Specifically, the transthalamic pathway involves projections from one area of the cortex to

Disentangling Ventral Frontal Cortex Subregion Roles in Behavior Frederic Stoll and Peter Rudebeck (see article e0464242024) The ventral frontal cortex (VFC) plays key roles in flexible reward-based decision-making. But the VFC has anatomically distinct subregions and their contributions to flexibly making reward-based decisions is unclear. Furthermore, whether their roles are dissociable is unexplored. Stoll and Rudebeck explored these unknowns in male macaque monkeys. They recorded from neurons in eight anatomically defined VFC subregions as macaques chose between cues associated with distinct reward probabilities and …

Support for the Low-Dimensional Movement Control Hypothesis Julien Rossato, Simon Avrillon, Kylie Jane Tucker, Dario Farina, and Francois Hug (see article e0702242024) To generate a movement, spinal motor neurons must receive the correct inputs from the brain. This sounds simple enough, but it remains unclear how neurons in the brain can accurately target such a large quantity of motor neurons with high precision. Rossato et al. explored this in their study in this issue. In a group of male participants, they assessed how well motor units …