Principles of Neurobiology

Citation

Luo, L. (2020). Principles of Neurobiology (2nd ed.). Garland Science.

Chapter Summary

The second edition has fourteen chapters and runs to about 760 pages. The publisher describes a single-author text organised around key experiments, which builds from electrophysiology through molecular genetics to systems-level questions. The first edition (2015) had thirteen chapters and treated motor and regulatory systems in one chapter; the second edition separates them and adds a chapter on how the nervous system is constructed.

Chapter 1: An Invitation to Neurobiology

The opening chapter orients the reader. Terms that the book's glossary ties to its figures include the major brain divisions (forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain), the frontal and occipital lobes, glial cell types, the sensory and motor homunculi and the knee-jerk reflex. They also include a set of circuit motifs: divergent excitation, feedforward and feedback excitation and inhibition, and disinhibition.

Chapter 2: Signaling within Neurons

This chapter covers electrical signalling inside a single neuron. Its glossary terms point to ion channel selectivity and the "ball-and-chain" model of inactivation, the neuron treated as an electrical circuit with a "battery", subthreshold and suprathreshold stimulation, and saltatory conduction in myelinated axons. It also deals with axonal transport by kinesins and dynein.

Chapter 3: Signaling across Synapses

The chapter turns to chemical transmission. The glossary cites synaptic vesicles, the SNARE proteins and dynamin, spontaneous miniature end-plate potentials and a boxed treatment of the binomial distribution for quantal release. It also covers depressing and facilitating synapses, metabotropic receptors and their second-messenger cascades, and dendritic integration.

Chapter 4: Vision

Vision receives its own chapter. Glossary entries name the retina's cell types (ON and OFF bipolar cells, horizontal cells, starburst amacrine cells, midget and direction-selective ganglion cells), opsins, the fovea and the optic nerve, chiasm and tract. They also cover cortical simple cells and the dorsal stream.

Chapter 5: Wiring the Visual System

Here the question shifts from how circuits work to how they are assembled. Guidance cues (short-range cues, semaphorins, DCC/Unc40, the floor plate), fly photoreceptor wiring (the sevenless and boss mutants) and activity-dependent refinement (Hebb's rule, ocular dominance) are among the glossary's entries for this chapter.

Chapter 6: Olfaction, Taste, Audition, and Somatosensation

Four senses share one chapter. The glossary entries include odorant receptors, the olfactory bulb and mushroom body, hair cells and the organ of Corti, delay lines in auditory circuits, touch receptors, the dorsal column pathway and pain-related terms such as substance P and hyperalgesia.

Chapter 7: Constructing the Nervous System

This is the developmental chapter: early patterning (Sonic Hedgehog, the floor plate, Delta–Notch signalling), the transcription factors that specify cortical projection neuron identity (Fezf2 and Satb2), midline guidance by Slit, neural maps, Dscam, MuSK at the neuromuscular junction and synapse elimination.

Chapter 8: Motor Systems

The chapter runs from muscle (sarcomere, myosin, motor units and the size principle) through spinal circuits to the basal ganglia. The stomatogastric ganglion appears as a model rhythm generator, and the glossary also defines "dynamical system" for this chapter.

Chapter 9: Regulatory Systems

Homeostatic control by the hypothalamus is the theme. Glossary terms include the sympathetic system, MC4R and feeding, the dehydration-sensing regions of the lamina terminalis (the subfornical organ, OVLT and median preoptic nucleus) and the suprachiasmatic nucleus. A companion video covers circadian rhythms.

Chapter 10: Sexual Behavior

The chapter covers how sex-typical behaviour is specified: the fruitless and doublesex genes in the fly, kisspeptins, the medial preoptic area and the organization–activation model of hormone action, with companion videos on mating and pup retrieval.

Chapter 11: Memory, Learning, and Synaptic Plasticity

The chapter treats memory from the synapse upward: the hippocampal circuit and field recordings of long-term potentiation, synaptic tagging, the synaptic weight matrix, working memory, head direction cells and grid cells, and sharp-wave ripples.

Chapter 12: Brain Disorders

The single clinical chapter. Glossary entries include seizures and benzodiazepines, L-dopa and the substantia nigra, MeCP2, secretases involved in Alzheimer's disease, mTOR and spinocerebellar ataxia; the companion site includes a video on prion diseases.

Chapter 13: Evolution of the Nervous System

The chapter links nervous systems across animal groups. Terms include bilaterians and deuterostomes, Hox genes, exon shuffling, the biased random walk of bacterial chemotaxis, sensory rhodopsin and outer radial glia in the expanded human cortex.

Chapter 14: Ways of Exploring

A methods chapter: forward genetic screens, knockouts, MARCM and other genetic mosaic tools, optogenetics, single-unit and patch-clamp recording, multielectrode arrays, super-resolution and serial electron microscopy, diffusion tensor imaging and single-cell RNA sequencing. Companion videos include CLARITY and connectome reconstruction.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: Orientation, Neuronal Signalling and Synapses

• Circuit motifs: recurring wiring patterns such as feedforward inhibition, in which a neuron receives direct excitation and delayed inhibition through an interneuron.
• Saltatory conduction: in a myelinated axon the action potential jumps from one node of Ranvier to the next.
• SNAREs: proteins on vesicles and target membranes that drive membrane fusion during transmitter release.
• Quantal release: spontaneous miniature potentials and a binomial description of how many vesicles fuse.

Chapters 4–7: Sensing and Wiring

• Dendritic tiling: dendrites of one neuron type cover a receptive field exactly once.
• Short-range cue: a cell-surface protein that guides an axon only on direct contact.
• Hebb's rule: repeated coincident firing strengthens a connection, a principle used for activity-dependent refinement.
• Discrete map: input or target neurons organised into distinct units, such as glomeruli or layers.

Chapters 8–10: Motor and Regulatory Systems

• Size principle: within a motor pool, neurons with smaller motor units fire first.
• Dynamical system: a system whose next state depends on its current state, input and noise, used to model neural population activity.
• Organization–activation model: sex hormones configure the brain during development and trigger behaviour in adults.

Chapters 11–14: Memory, Disease, Evolution and Methods

• Synaptic tagging: a tag set at a potentiated synapse captures the new molecules needed to stabilise potentiation, preserving input specificity.
• Head direction cell: fires when the animal faces a particular direction, wherever it is.
• Optogenetics: light-controlled manipulation of neurons that express microbial opsins.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Experiment-led exposition. The publisher describes the text as organised around key experiments that show how progress is made and lead students to the primary literature. Endorsements printed on the publisher's page pick out the same feature: Marla Feller praises the experiment-led explanations, Rachel Wilson notes that the book describes the path to each discovery and the technologies that made it possible, and Edvard Moser remarks on the integration that comes from one author covering the whole field.
• Methods get a chapter of their own. Chapter 14 collects genetic, imaging, recording and computational tools, so techniques used throughout the earlier chapters can be looked up in one place.
• Genetic model organisms alongside mammals. Glossary entries on Drosophila (Sevenless, MARCM, Fruitless, the mushroom body) sit beside entries on mammalian circuits, so fly and mouse work are treated together.
• Companion material. The companion site offers the videos cited in the text, flashcards, a browsable glossary whose entries cite figure and box numbers, and a blog of monthly research updates intended to extend the chapters.

Limitations

• Aimed above a first course. The publisher addresses upper-level undergraduates and graduates, and the prerequisites assume prior cell biology. Students new to the nervous system will find the reasoning from experiments demanding without an introductory text first.
• Uneven balance across topics. Vision has two chapters, while olfaction, taste, hearing and somatosensation share one. Higher cognitive topics such as attention, language and decision making have no chapters of their own; the book's last chapters turn to brain disorders, evolution and methods.
• One clinical chapter. Clinical neuroscience is concentrated in Chapter 12, so readers who need neuroanatomy or clinical correlation will need a companion text.

Where It Fits in the Course

Luo sits between the gentle introductions and the specialist texts in this course. Casey Henley's Foundations of Neuroscience is a free, short-section introduction, and Bear, Connors and Paradiso's Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain is an introduction organised around behaviour; either suits readers who have not yet met neurons and synapses. Luo is a good second step for students who want to understand how the field's claims were established.

Two other books cover similar ground in different ways. Martin and colleagues' From Neuron to Brain is a long-established cellular and systems text that likewise builds its account from key experiments and recordings. Augustine and colleagues' Neuroscience is the broader reference, with chapters on attention, language, emotion and decision making that Luo lacks. For quantitative modelling after Luo's chapters on signalling and circuits, Dayan and Abbott's Theoretical Neuroscience is the graduate-level text.

How to Use This Book

Prerequisites are introductory biology and cell biology; some molecular biology and basic physics help with the signalling chapters. The publisher states that the book can be read in full in a semester-long course.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapters 1–3, which establish circuit vocabulary, electrical signalling and synaptic transmission.
• Sensory and developmental pairing: Chapters 4–5 on vision and its wiring read well together, followed by Chapter 7 for general principles of constructing the nervous system. Chapter 6 can be sampled by sense.
• Systems and behaviour: Chapters 8–11, in the order that matches the course.
• Optional or selective: Chapter 12 for disease mechanisms, Chapter 13 for evolutionary context.
• Methods reference: Chapter 14 can be read after Chapter 3 or consulted as techniques arise.

Use the companion videos and flashcards beside the relevant chapters, and treat the figure-cited glossary as a map for revising. Read each chapter by asking what experiment supports each claim, which is the habit the book is designed to build.