Cell
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Depression is a debilitating condition with a profound impact on quality of life for millions of people worldwide. Physical exercise is used as a treatment strategy for many patients, but the mechanisms that underlie its beneficial effects remain unknown. ⋯ Reducing plasma kynurenine protects the brain from stress-induced changes associated with depression and renders skeletal muscle-specific PGC-1α1 transgenic mice resistant to depression induced by chronic mild stress or direct kynurenine administration. This study opens therapeutic avenues for the treatment of depression by targeting the PGC-1α1-PPAR axis in skeletal muscle, without the need to cross the blood-brain barrier.
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Biography Historical Article
From anatomy to electrophysiology: clinical Lasker goes deep.
This year, the Lasker∼DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award will be shared by Mahlon R. DeLong and Alim-Louis Benabid for elucidating the role of the subthalamic nucleus in mediating the motor dysfunction of Parkinson's disease and for pioneering the use of deep-brain stimulation to alleviate symptoms of the disease.
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Animals display a range of innate social behaviors that play essential roles in survival and reproduction. While the medial amygdala (MeA) has been implicated in prototypic social behaviors such as aggression, the circuit-level mechanisms controlling such behaviors are not well understood. Using cell-type-specific functional manipulations, we find that distinct neuronal populations in the MeA control different social and asocial behaviors. ⋯ Moreover, this glutamatergic subpopulation inhibits social interactions independently of its effect to promote self-grooming, while the GABAergic subpopulation inhibits self-grooming, even in a nonsocial context. These data suggest that social versus repetitive asocial behaviors are controlled in an antagonistic manner by inhibitory versus excitatory amygdala subpopulations, respectively. These findings provide a framework for understanding circuit-level mechanisms underlying opponency between innate behaviors, with implications for their perturbation in psychiatric disorders.