This month’s featured researcher is Mary Harrington. Mary is the Tippit Professor in the Life Sciences at Smith College. She is an associate member of the UMass Neuroscience and Behavior Program. Her research focuses on circadian rhythms. She recently published a paper in the Journal of Biological Rhythms with collaborators at Amherst College and UMass Medical School using a Per2:Luciferase reporter to track circadian activity in freely-moving mice. The cross-institution collaborations point to the vibrant cooperative community of researchers in the 5-Colleges.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared online in December. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

1: Parma V, … Nolden AA, … Hayes JE. Corrigendum to: More Than Smell-COVID-19 Is Associated With Severe Impairment of Smell, Taste, and Chemesthesis. Chem Senses. 2021 Jan 1;46:bjab050. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjab050. Erratum for: Chem Senses. 2020 Oct 9;45(7):609-622. PMID: 34879393.

2: Martin-Burgos B, Wang W, William I, Tir S, Mohammad I, Javed R, Smith S, Cui Y, Arzavala J, Mora D, Smith CB, van der Vinne V, Molyneux PC, Miller SC, Weaver DR, Leise TL, Harrington ME. Methods for Detecting PER2:LUCIFERASE Bioluminescence Rhythms in Freely Moving Mice. J Biol Rhythms. 2021 Dec 7:7487304211062829. doi: 10.1177/07487304211062829. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34873943.

3: Rigano A, … Chambers JJ, … Strambio-De-Castillia C. Micro-Meta App: an interactive tool for collecting microscopy metadata based on community specifications. Nat Methods. 2021 Dec;18(12):1489-1495. doi: 10.1038/s41592-021-01315-z. Epub 2021 Dec 3. PMID: 34862503.

4: Rivera-Rodriguez A, Sherwood M, Fitzroy AB, Sanders LD, Dasgupta N. Anger, race, and the neurocognition of threat: attention, inhibition, and error processing during a weapon identification task. Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2021 Nov 20;6(1):74. doi: 10.1186/s41235-021-00342-w. PMID: 34800191; PMCID: PMC8605958.

5: Zhu Y, Mooney LJ, Yoo C, Evans EA, Kelleghan A, Saxon AJ, Curtis ME, Hser YI. Psychiatric comorbidity and treatment outcomes in patients with opioid use disorder: Results from a multisite trial of buprenorphine-naloxone and methadone. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2021 Nov 1;228:108996. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.108996. Epub 2021 Aug 28. PMID: 34555691; PMCID: PMC8674982.

6: Pak C, Danko T, Mirabella VR, Wang J, Liu Y, Vangipuram M, Grieder S, Zhang X, Ward T, Huang YA, Jin K, Dexheimer P, Bardes E, Mitelpunkt A, Ma J, McLachlan M, Moore JC, Qu P, Purmann C, Dage JL, Swanson BJ, Urban AE, Aronow BJ, Pang ZP, Levinson DF, Wernig M, Südhof TC. Cross-platform validation of neurotransmitter release impairments in schizophrenia patient-derived NRXN1-mutant neurons. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Jun 1;118(22):e2025598118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2025598118. PMID: 34035170; PMCID: PMC8179243.

7: Holmes JF, St Laurent CW, Spencer RMC. Unhealthy Diet Is Associated With Poor Sleep in Preschool-Aged Children. J Genet Psychol. 2021 Sep-Oct;182(5):289-303. doi: 10.1080/00221325.2021.1905598. Epub 2021 Apr 20. PMID: 33876710.

8: Tuladhar CT, Schwartz S, St John AM, Meyer JS, Tarullo AR. Infant diurnal cortisol predicts sleep. J Sleep Res. 2021 Dec;30(6):e13357. doi: 10.1111/jsr.13357. Epub 2021 Apr 18. PMID: 33870573.

9: Meyer JS, Novak MA. Assessment of prenatal stress-related cortisol exposure: focus on cortisol accumulation in hair and nails. Dev Psychobiol. 2021 Apr;63(3):409-436. doi: 10.1002/dev.22021. Epub 2020 Aug 11. PMID: 32783213.

10: Spool JA, Bergan JF, Remage-Healey L. A neural circuit perspective on brain aromatase. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2021 Dec 20:100973. doi: 10.1016/j.yfrne.2021.100973. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34942232.

11: Kainec KA, Paracha AW, Ali S, Bussa R, Mantua J, Spencer R. Age-related changes in sleep-dependent novel word consolidation. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2021 Dec 23;222:103478. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103478. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34954541.

12: Fuccillo MV, Pak C. Copy number variants in neurexin genes: phenotypes and mechanisms. Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2021 Jun;68:64-70. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2021.02.010. Epub 2021 Mar 21. PMID: 33756113; PMCID: PMC8491281.

13: Nelson G, … J, Chambers JJ, … Nitschke R. QUAREP-LiMi: A community-driven initiative to establish guidelines for quality assessment and reproducibility for instruments and images in light microscopy. J Microsc. 2021 Oct;284(1):56-73. doi: 10.1111/jmi.13041. Epub 2021 Aug 11. PMID: 34214188.