Happy 100th birthday Sir Attenborough!

New @currentbiology.bsky.social paper from Dr. Leila Elabbady on neural circuits that transform a touch stimulus into spatially targeted grooming. Leila discovered a leg somatotopic map and used it to infer tactile receptive fields in the fly VNC connectome. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mvu83QW8S...

Sometimes failed experiments reveal gaps in how we are thinking about a problem, and digging into why an experiment didn't work can lead to discovery. This new preprint by Anne Sustar, in collaboration with Dion Dickman's lab, is one of those gratifying instances.🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

When a fly lands on your arm, how does your nervous system decide where to swat? By reconstructing tactile axons in a Drosophila connectome, we found a leg somatotopic map and downstream circuits that sample the map to initiate targeted grooming Led by Leila Elabbady, PhD doi.org/10.64898/202...

Happy to share work I contributed to during my time in the Murthy lab! now published in @currentbiology.bsky.social 🎉🥳 www.cell.com/current-biol...

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

Iranians are experiencing a collective trauma. Thousands have been killed/injured in recent events, the economy is crippled & the threat of a wider conflict is real. This is especially difficult for those living in Iran, as many have lost (or fear losing) loved ones. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How does the brain control locomotion? In our new preprint, we uncover a brain circuit in Drosophila that controls forward walking independently of turning. This dedicated locomotor circuit enables flexible motor control and might reflect a shared principle across species. doi.org/10.64898/202...

I often think about Zohran Mamdani saying “to get to any of us, you’re gonna have to go through all of us.”

How do neural circuits generate the walking rhythm? Using connectome simulations, @sarahpugly.bsky.social found a minimal central pattern generator (CPG) that produces oscillations in leg motor neurons. Same circuit motif for each 🪰 leg. w @bingbrunton.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

NEW: Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, will become New Jersey's next governor, The Associated Press reports. https://to.pbs.org/4paXpT5

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral race, NBC News projects. nbcnews.to/4nIzNUC

Do flies feel pain? Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social. 🪰⚡👻🎃 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Agrawal lab is moving! This January we will be setting up shop at #UBC in Vancouver, in the department of #Zoology! We are actively recruiting at all levels, especially masters and PhD students. These position are #funded! Please send anyone interested my way!

Now out in @nature.com: Our study discovering a neural circuit in Drosophila that predictively inhibits proprioceptor axons during voluntary leg movements, such as walking and grooming. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So proud of Jess Jones, an HHMI Gilliam Fellow, for defending her PhD today in @tuthill.bsky.social's lab! Jess was one of my lab's 1st hires in 2018. She was also 1st author of one of our first papers: elifesciences.org/articles/57258. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her contributions.

FlyBase, a Drosophila database, will lose a third of its team in early October because the Harvard grant that covered the employees’ salaries was canceled. Scientists warn that losing FlyBase could devastate fly research. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/community/ha...

More Steve Flurkel !!

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...

I am thrilled to present the Mosquito Cell Atlas! We analyzed 367K nuclei from 19 tissues in male & female mosquitoes, creating a comprehensive resource for vector biology & infectious disease research. Plus we made some surprising discoveries! 🦟🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n

Happy Friday! The female adult fly brain-and-nerve-cord (BANC) connectome is now LIVE! Explore the data here: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Check out the preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

settling back into Edinburgh after a great USA trip for the 2025 somatosensory rat module with another outstanding group of students, faculty, course managers & directors @nsb-mbl.bsky.social @mblscience.bsky.social & bonus visit to the Dulac lab @dulaclab.bsky.social

We're thrilled to announce the largest private gift in our 137-year history: a $25 million unrestricted donation from MBL Whitman Scientist Mark Terasaki. His extraordinary generosity will bolster our renowned research and education programs. 🔬 Learn more: bit.ly/452WL1m

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. 🧵..

8 weeks in the hole! Oh how I love these people ❤️

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...

Using high-speed video and neural networks, researchers have compared hunting behaviours across five species of larval fish. The study uncovers both shared strategies and striking differences in how fish move, see, and strike during prey capture. buff.ly/T2o9JJp #EvoBio

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...

Our new paper is now out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social!!! We had all sorts of fun generating LED stimuli for mosquitos to investigate their visual preferences in the presence of different odors. The paper is open access and available here: journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/...

Tried patching some neurons in the habenula today… When we got there we noticed these beautiful cilia waving around coming off ependymal cells lining the third ventricle. Bonkers

Upper Manhattan about to call private security on the rest of the city lol

a former governor scion of a political dynasty losing to a 33 year old is a world historic crashout

The kind of timeline synchronicity you wait your whole life for.

Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬! 10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁 paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx #bioacoustics #neuroskyence 1/8

Big lawsuit filed today defending NSF. It’s a coalition including @aaup.bsky.social , @uaw.org , and @democracyforward.org . See thread🧪

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!

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)

In our latest edition of “This paper changed my life,” Bradley Dickerson discusses how a 1940s fly neuroanatomy paper taught him how to think about circuits and behavior being greater than the sum of their parts. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

First 2 weeks done at the NS&B course in woods hole. Made it through the LONG days poking leech neurons thanks to amazing faculty, supportive cohort and pie in the sky. Iykyk. Can’t wait to work on the stomatigastric ganglion next 🦀

We’re watching Elon Musk realize the man he did more than anyone to install as President of the United States is now the President of the United States.

How do we get more neuroscience out of our behavioral data? Excited to share new work with C.A.Baker, M.Murthy and @jpillowtime.bsky.social, where we use natural behavior data to extend predictions from neural recordings about population codes for dynamic social stimuli: tinyurl.com/2d3wwfyf

New preprint from the lab, led by grad student Brandon Pratt, on the encoding properties and sensorimotor function of proprioceptive limit detectors (ie, hair plates) in the fly leg. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mayor Baraka from Newark, NJ holds a press conference detailing how GEO Group has opened an ICE detention facility without permits or inspections. They can’t even verify if there are detainees inside because GEO Group is refusing to allow city officials inside.

HAPPENING NOW: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was just taken into custody while protesting outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention center

Sometimes you’ve just gotta put your hair up, open a nice bottle of wine and put on the 2012 cinematic masterpiece “Ice Age: Continental Drift.”

Happy to announce that our paper examining the function of leg mechanosensory neurons by way of their connectivity is finally officially published! rdcu.be/ekqVt

It took more than a decade to trace the 130,000 connections in a fruit fly's brain. With the map in hand, researchers are turning to the next step in connectomics: building simulations. By @ldattaro.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/c...

Drosophila neuroscience friends! Please help us to identify deserving Ph.D. students or recent Ph.D. graduates for the Elkins Memorial Lecture competition (CSHL, October 2025). Details below – send nominations by email to Troy Littleton ([email protected]).