How do #sponges coordinate their bodies despite lacking neurons and true muscles? We show that sponges use monoamines to control water flow in their canals — reminiscent of how adrenaline regulates blood vessels. My PhD story, now on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #Evolution

Another one with our next door colleagues! @marianneroca.bsky.social in @jameslightfoot.bsky.social's group found the IL2 neurons detecting prey (this study) are also sensing octopamine, which we recently found plays an important role in predatory aggression! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ever wanted to do a genome-scale CRISPR screen for a microscopy phenotype? Pooled CRISPR screens are amazing, but hard to combine with imaging... Excited to share our latest work in Dev Cell on a technology platform for imaging screens and applications to primary cilia: www.cell.com/developmenta...

Excited to share my most recent postdoctoral work in the Jeanne lab @yaleneuro.bsky.social ! “Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We ask: how is a sensory code transformed across multiple stages of processing to inform behavior?

Excited to share our latest work on a new cilia disassembly pathway and a link between this pathway and the neurological disorder focal cortical dysplasia: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Brief summary: we used a genome-wide CRISPRa GOF screen to identify negative regulators of ciliary signaling...

I'm thrilled to share our new preprint, in which we've found that neurotransmitters can be chemically "marked" as a way to incorporate metabolic history - such as diet or life stage. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Led by Porhathai "Un" Malaiwong, Allen Schroeder and Tia Brown. (1/6) 🧵

Despite the mess, we are grateful to be funded, have exciting science happening, and have an opening for a postdoc! If you are interested in sensory biology and esp in cilia, thermosensation, or interoception, and would like to join an interactive & supportive group - please email. Please RT 🙏

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

Thrilled to share a new preprint from the lab! We investigated how m6A regulates the transcriptome in chemoresistant glioblastoma through unexpected mechanisms, and the potential therapeutic applications of this discovery. Check out the preprint here ⬇️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Well, none of us may ever get funded again but in the meantime, here's some new science! Led by recent PhD Anjali Pandey w/ex-UG Maya Katz. Here we identify an asymmetric molecular mechanism that underlies symmetric context-dependent sensory plasticity in the AWC olfactory neuron pair in C. elegans

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Despite all that is going on, we are still all working on our science. Our 2nd collaboration with @jisaacmurray.bsky.social‬ and Bob Waterston (UW) is out: Lineage-resolved analysis of embryonic gene expression evolution in C. elegans and C. briggsae | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our posting for a research technologist is now live! This job is ideally suited for a recent college grad interested in lab experience. Please spread the word! uwhires.admin.washington.edu/ENG/Candidat...

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

New paper ALERT!! Mara Cowen, PhD discovered and defined how conserved autism-associated genes modify a 'social' behavior in C. elegans!! So proud of her work in the lab! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪 Lab's latest!! Work by PD (and now PI) Alison Philbrook. C. elegans sensory neurons have gorgeous #cilia. We’ve always thought that a) no cilia = no sensory responses, & b) no IFT = no cilia. Punchline is we thought wrong. Read paper for more! #neuroscience journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...