Publisher Correction: Medial preoptic circuit induces hunting-like actions to target objects and prey.

In the version of this article initially published, a sentence in the fifth paragraph of the Results read, "Immunohistochemistry revealed that VGLUT2+ MPA neurons rarely expressed CaMKIIα, which is a putative marker for subcortical glutamatergic neurons." It should have read, "Immunohistochemistry revealed that CaMKIIα+ MPA neurons rarely expressed VGLUT2, which is a putative marker for subcortical glutamatergic neurons." The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article. In the supplementary information originally posted online, the wrong version of Supplementary Fig. 1 was posted and some of the supplementary videos were interchanged. In the corrected Supplementary Fig. 1, the top right subpanel was added and the original Supplementary Fig. 1a was divided into 1a and 1b, with subsequent panels incremented accordingly. The legend was changed from "a. Schematic illustrating electrical lesioning of the rat anterior hypothalamus. Electrical lesion areas (gray) in five representative brain sections are depicted. Scale bar, 1 mm" to "a. Repetitive electrical stimulations of the anterior hypothalamus using bipolar electrodes (Left) caused a lesion at the hypothalamic area (middle, marked by asterisk) successfully in 7 rats (Right, overlapped images of brain sections located from the bregma -0.24 mm). Scale bar, 1 mm. b. Electrical lesion areas (gray) in five representative brain sections from anterior to posterior are depicted." The errors have been corrected online.

Medial preoptic circuit induces hunting-like actions to target objects and prey.

As animals forage, they must obtain useful targets by orchestrating appropriate actions that range from searching to chasing, biting and carrying. Here, we reveal that neurons positive for the α subunit of Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent kinase II (CaMKIIα) in the medial preoptic area (MPA) that send projections to the ventral periaqueductal gray (vPAG) mediate these target-directed actions in mice. During photostimulation of the MPA-vPAG circuit, mice vigorously engaged with 3D objects and chased moving objects. When exposed to a cricket, they hunted down the prey and bit it to kill. By applying a head-mounted object control with timely photostimulation of the MPA-vPAG circuit, we found that MPA-vPAG circuit-induced actions occurred only when the target was detected within the binocular visual field. Using this device, we successfully guided mice to navigate specified routes. Our study explains how the brain yields a strong motivation to acquire a target object along the continuum of hunting behavior.

Toward Modular Analysis of Supramolecular Protein Assemblies.

Despite recent advances in molecular simulation technologies, analysis of high-molecular-weight structures is still challenging. Here, we propose an automated model reduction procedure aiming to enable modular analysis of these structures. It employs a component mode synthesis for the reduction of finite element protein models. Reduced models may consist of real biological subunits or artificial partitions whose dynamics is described using the degrees of freedom at the substructural interfaces and a small set of dominant vibrational modes only. Notably, the proper number of dominant modes is automatically determined using a novel estimator for eigenvalue errors without calculating the reference eigensolutions of the full model. The performance of the proposed approach is thoroughly investigated by analyzing 50 representative structures including a crystal structure of GroEL and an electron density map of a ribosome.

Remote guidance of untrained turtles by controlling voluntary instinct behavior.

Recently, several studies have been carried out on the direct control of behavior in insects and other lower animals in order to apply these behaviors to the performance of specialized tasks in an attempt to find more efficient means of carrying out these tasks than artificial intelligence agents. While most of the current methods cause involuntary behavior in animals by electronically stimulating the corresponding brain area or muscle, we show that, in turtles, it is also possible to control certain types of behavior, such as movement trajectory, by evoking an appropriate voluntary instinctive behavior. We have found that causing a particular behavior, such as obstacle avoidance, by providing a specific visual stimulus results in effective control of the turtle's movement. We propose that this principle may be adapted and expanded into a general framework to control any animal behavior as an alternative to robotic probes.