Ed Kravitz passed away yesterday. He was a remarkable scientist and mentor- brilliant, curious, creative, and kind. I am grateful to have learned from him. His legacy will endure through his science and through the many people he inspired. We will miss you, Ed.

The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Thesis defense for Jess Jones happening tomorrow! DM me if you'd like the zoom link.

And we are live! Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️ Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions! www.kaggle.com/competitions...

new pape from our lab, led by the indefatigable @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social. i am very proud of this one.

The first nerve net connectome is here, and it belongs to a comb jelly. This ancient lineage could crack open research into the evolution of sensory motor coordination, researchers say. By @siddhantpusdekar.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/f...

🪰 How do dozens of tiny fly muscles cooperate to move a leg? We’re excited to share the first 3D, data-driven musculoskeletal model of Drosophila legs based on Hill-type muscles, running in OpenSim and MuJoCo simulation environments. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.06426

finally got to visit NIH intramural campus in Bethesda for a seminar, which was originally cancelled last feb when the federal travel ban came down nice to check in on old friends and make some new ones. didn't get to see my boy jay b in person but he was certainly omnipresent 🤨

When I was living in Missoula after college, our buddy cold-called David Baltimore & asked if we could come meet him (we’d all studied biology at Swarthmore, like him), and amazingly said yes. He couldn’t have been nicer to such a rag-tag bunch. Rest in Peace to a giant. @tuthill.bsky.social

Biology, what are you doing? Follow the rules. www.science.org/content/arti...

🍂 Applications are now open for our ML-for-Behavior 5-day course at Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, ME. Talks and hands-on workshops cover pose estimation, supervised/unsupervised behavior quantification, and downstream behavior analyses. Financial aid is available! www.jax.org/education-an...

Our science photo book The Radiant Sea is out Sept 2nd!! 30 years of research, 10 years of "we should", and a year of collating pix and writing. Sönke and I show (mostly for the first time) images of how organisms produce, use, and interact with light in the sea. #bioluminescence #fluorescence 🦑🧪🌊

Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns? To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠 #preprint thread ⬇️1/8

bon voyage to grant chou who, after 3 years in our lab, is now extremely well calibrated and starting his phd @princetonneuro.bsky.social this week.

It was a good experience to step back and briefly take stock of the amazing progress in connectomics since I started working on this stuff (20 years ago!) thanks as well to @natrevneuro.nature.com for the constructive editorial interactions.

Over 20 years after Julius’s lab and mine cloned TRPM8, it is rewarding to see this science helping patients. The TRPM8 agonist Tryptyr treats dry eye by increasing tear production. A reminder that NIH-funded curiosity-driven research translates to medicines. tryptyr.myalcon.com?gad_source=1...

Total disaster for the #drosophila community if flybase disappears

congratulations to our own Juan Ispizua on being selected as a pew latin american postdoctoral fellow www.pew.org/en/projects/...

We need about 300 more scientists before we let teachers loose on the database! Tell your colleagues, we need ya!

We need more papers that start with Steve Urkel quotes. Thank you @kylethieringer.com and @tuthill.bsky.social for this wonderful and fun review of our recent paper describing limb feedback in the visual system! doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Graduate student @kylethieringer.com and I wrote a dispatch about a new @currentbiology.bsky.social paper (doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...) describing a proprioceptive neural circuit that helps the fly visual system identify (and ignore) its own legs. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lYLj3QW8S...

How is the nervous system organized to coordinate behavior? To approach this massive question, a team led by @asbates.bsky.social, @jasper-tms.bsky.social, @mindyisminsu.bsky.social, & Helen Yang present the BANC: a Brain and Nerve Cord connectome. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧪#Neuroskyence

The first full central nervous system connectome dataset of an adult fly, with the most comprehensive annotation of sensory and motor neurons to date. A heroic effort with contributions from many groups, a product of the collaborative spirit of the Drosophila neuroscience community.

If #NeuroAI efforts are to provide any insight into biology, they must carefully consider each animal’s body, not just tracked key points and other aggregate measures of behavior, write @bingbrunton.bsky.social and @tuthill.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/brea...

Preprint Alert! Walking mostly feels natural and easy to us - but the neuronal control of walking is actually incredibly complex. We leveraged the fruit fly as a genetically tractable animal model with a compact nervous system to ask how the brain controls walking direction: tinyurl.com/flywalk. 🧵..

Amidst everything, the lab's first preprint is out! It's just a methods paper, no scientific results (yet!), but it's still great to see it all pulled together. We hope that these open-source behavioral tools will be useful for others!

Embodiment is the concept that the function of the brain is inexorably shaped by the body, a lens that is often neglected when neuroscientists study specific brain subsystems, write @bingbrunton.bsky.social and @tuthill.bsky.social. #neuroskyence #neuroai www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/brea...

As grants are canceled, delayed and subject to general uncertainty, participating in study sections can feel futile. But I think it’s more important than ever, writes @tuthill.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

ill take a "mostly great" review from @drugmonkey.bsky.social any day. some good points in this thread, which digs deeper into the relative roles of peer reviewers, program officers, and institute directors in our multi-tier system of evaluating and funding NIH grants.

i wrote an essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social about what it feels like to serve on an NIH grant review panel (study section) right now www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

a peak into the crater of kulshan (mt baker). one of my favorite places.

New paper: Ben Ewen-Campen, Weihang Chen, Sudhir Gopal Tattikota, Ying Liu, Yanhui Hu, Norbert Perrimon The Drosophila proventriculus lacks stem cells but compensates for age-related cell loss via endoreplication-mediated cell growth doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🚨 In our world riddled with misinformation and sensationalization, we must be cautious about handling accusations of scientific misconduct in our community. Weaponizing a public internet campaign is not the way. 📖 Read "A plea for academic decency" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

1/N How do neural dynamics in motor cortex interact with those in subcortical networks to flexibly control movement? I’m beyond thrilled to share our work on this problem, led by Eric Kirk @eric-kirk.bsky.social with help from Kangjia Cai! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Beautiful work by my lab's first alumnus, Bin Yu, from his PhD thesis in the Komiyama lab. I remember explaining the action potential to a wide-eyed Bin, who was at that point an electrical engineering MS student who had never taken a biology class.

My favorite outcome was validating species descriptions from 18th century scientists who illustrated animals on their voyages. Their descriptions were often rejected as implausible – we found that in many cases they were exactly right. Yet another reason why @biodivlibrary.bsky.social is so valuable

Congrats to the 2025 cohort of McKnight Scholars! www.mcknight.org/news-ideas/2...

Happy to present a single cell atlas of ALL glia, in BOTH sexes of an animal (in vivo validated!)! Fab work by postdoc @glia-maria.bsky.social, team, & collaboration with @manusetty.bsky.social . Find insights into glia, new analytics and ML models, and browse our companion website (wormglia.org)

ice worms (Mesenchytraeus solifugus) out in full force on the Paradise glacier, Mt Rainier, feasting on snow algae because they live inside glacial ice, almost nothing is known about these amazing creatures: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_worm

Nice profile of Tuthill/Collman lab PhD student (soon to be grad 😭) Leila Elabaddy, who apparently "never set out to become a scientist". So happy we managed to con her into it!

truly a sick pape and brad knows pringle better than anyone

Is it true you use only 10 bits / s of your brain? @andpru.bsky.social and I provide a motor systems perspective on a proposed speed limit for human information processing. Out today in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇 bit.ly/44aVm9E

Trump's NIH Director couldn't tell me how many clinical trials had been impacted by grants he’s frozen, terminated, or delayed. So I told him—he cancelled clinical trials to: -Develop an HIV vaccine, -Treat type II diabetes -Help cure recurrent ovarian cancer. This is what's happening RIGHT NOW.

This morning, courageous NIH workers shared a document they are calling the “Bethesda Declaration” with Dr. Bhattacharya, urging him to reverse some of the actions that are badly misaligned with progress toward the NIH mission. 1/3

FlyBase, a crucial resource for drosophila research, has lost its funding because its grant is awarded to Harvard. The team is scrambling to find other sources of funds, including donations from labs. Read more: www.thetransmitter.org/community/fl... @flybase.bsky.social

i am excited to be hosting sophie tintori tomorrow for the last @uw-nbio.bsky.social seminar of the academic year. sophie is both a brilliant artist and an amazing scientist, if you are at UW, don't miss this opportunity to absorb some of her bounteous Qi

Hello Fly Folks. quick note FlyBase is under duress due to termination NIH$ to Harvard and intl collabs. The hardworking folks @flybase.bsky.social are doing their darndest to ensure access to current data. For US, there will soon be a new site to donate. Please spread the word, ideas and support 🪰💪

So happy to share this project detailing fly wing sensory neurons! I started this project just by asking what the axons of the wing chordotonal organ looked like, and I found many other cool structures along the way.

new preprint, led by @ellenlesser.bsky.social, on proprioceptive sensing of the Drosophila wing. tldr, there are a lot of proprioceptors out in the wing and they are wildly diverse and complex (eg, compared to the fly leg). just one example in this image...(1/4) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...