As money woes hit the University of Chicago, the oldest private marine laboratory in the United States is striking out on its own. https://scim.ag/4trAN3l

Please spread the word: We invite applications to a two-week Computational Biology workshop in Singapore, June 14-27. This NSF-funded workshop brings together 16-20 US grad students with international peers. Apply by March 21: compbioasia.net 🧵 Details below:

But, as they say, there is no time like the present [OK, maybe the 1930s if you want to nitpick] But, with some data wrangling, my first NSF Funding Curves! 2/3

beautiful protist ExM images here from @dudinlab.bsky.social and @gautamdey.bsky.social

Want to come do a postdoc with us? We’re interested in how sensorimotor function is carried out by the cells and circuits of the spinal cord. We have an awesome team, lots of cool techniques, and we’re open to new ideas/approaches/connections. Get in touch!

I usually hesitate to post obituaries but this one, of my literary agent, Georges Borchardt, born in 1928, is so unusual that it deserves to be widely shared. An incredible 20th century life www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/o...

Our CytoTape work is published today in Nature @nature.com! CytoTape is a genetically encoded, flexible, intracellular protein tape recorder for spatiotemporally scalable and multiplexed recording of cellular activities continuously across weeks in vitro and in vivo. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another bit on eye-sight: I've put together a plot on visual acuity in birds and mammals. Interestingly, corvids seem to have acuity that is a lot better than expected for their eye size/passerines in general. Is anyone aware of structural peculiarities of corvid eyes that might explain that? 🧪🪶

The bill includes a 33 percent budget increase for the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative, which has faced significant funding cuts over the past two years. By @avaskham.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/funding/neur...

The winner of the 2026 Pradel Research Award is H. Sebastian Seung of @princetonneuro.bsky.social! He is being honored for for transformative advances in computational neuroscience. Learn more about his discoveries: www.nasonline.org/award/pradel... #NASaward #neuroscience

What's the relation between voltage and calcium in dendrites? Xiang Wu studied this in CA2 hippocampal pyramidal cells in behaving mice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This course looks great. Amazing organisms + friendly and highly expert instructors, several of whom I have had the privilege of getting to know during my time so far here in Heidelberg. Strong recommend!

Please apply. Amazing opportunity to dive into connectomics datasets for research, educational initiatives, outreach and whatever else your heart desires. Feb 2nd deadline.

Big news! The Data Management team/Data Science Centre at EMBL (i.e. my team) is hiring for a position based in Heidelberg (but working across all sites!). We are looking for a scientific workflows developer that will focus on multimodal pipelines. embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Thank you!!! This was a whole lot of work by a whole lot of people!!!!

If you are interested in electron microscopy, registration is still open for the "Electron Microscopy Hands-On Course: sample preparation and imaging of marine environmental samples" at Stazione Zoologica in Naples. WIth great teachers from Naples […] [Original post on biologists.social]

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...

The cryo cyclical multiplexing expansion microscopy (Cy-ExM) preprint from @seweryn-galecki.bsky.social , @kevin-dean.bsky.social et al is online. 20 targets across an entire cell. Mr. Snouty also joined the fun. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

my modest collection of flies with WIDE heads 🙇 a hammer-headed Richardia (Ecuador), a stalk-eyed Chaetodiopsis (Mozambique), a pointy-eyed Ophthalmoptera (Colombia), and an antlered Richardia (Colombia) why though? male-male competition? sexual selection? chime-in if you know!

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!! How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭 led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman: “Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread ⬇️

Our dispatch: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225014691 on the recent Hydra volume EM paper by Zhang, Rafa Yuste and colleagues: #connectomics, without synapses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982225013090 #neuroscience

🧠🪰 The adult Drosophila brain connectome now gives us a complete wiring diagram of ~140k neurons. But a wiring diagram alone isn’t understanding. How is this massive network organized? Our paper tackles that question by mapping community structure across the entire fly brain. 1/

A paper from my PhD lab is on Science! This is a really cool new way to utilize EM connectome datasets. Congrats to the team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Love the caption of Fig. 3 in this impressive preprint: "A Goodsell-esque 3D orthogonal rendering of an IsoNet2-processed FIB-milled tomogram of C. reinhardtii" doi.org/10.64898/202... Since I am no expert, what does the cryoET community think of IsoNet? @cellarchlab.com doi.org/10.1038/s414...

In addition to the Comments linked to below, this news article ("Technology Feature") ties together perspectives from many additional workers in the field, including yours truly: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I had heard this was coming, but it’s still an amazing indication of how far we’ve come in the last decade or so!

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

Do you have 2D-to-3D image registration challenges? Let me know about them here forum.image.sc/t/toward-bet...

Our new paper showcasing molecular connectomics with pan-expansion microscopy is out in @natbiotech.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... This wonderful collaboration with @bewersdorflab.bsky.social was led by Ons M'Saad (now founder/CEO of Panluminate) and @allisonphysics.bsky.social. (1/5)

I will be co-teaching a summer course at Allen Institute on connectomics education please apply. Travel support, new connectomics data sets and learning directly from the scientists who built these datasets. Details here: alleninstitute.org/events/incor...

SO HAPPY to share our new paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using volumetric EM, we found daily shifts in synapses, vesicles, and mitochondria that accompany neuronal remodeling, linking structural plasticity to changes in how s-LNv neurons influence their targets www.cell.com/current-biol...

This bring me back to one of my favorite anecdotes. In the early 1980s, a chemical physicist submitted a proposal to NIH that was assigned to NIGMS. It received a fairly poor score (~60th percentile). 7/13

How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926

Stop by Wangchu's poster Tuesday (11/18) afternoon to learn about circuit motifs supporting touch processing in the spinal cord.

Check these positions at @crick.ac.uk! It’s an outstanding opportunity to shape the way we can map neuronal circuits - and more broadly biological tissues.

If it’s your dream job to map the brain using light microscopy we should talk at #sfn25. Multiple opportunities. DMs open.

Our work on training biophysical models with Jaxley is now out in @natmethods.nature.com. Led by @deismic.bsky.social, with @philipp.hertie.ai, @ppjgoncalves.bsky.social & @jakhmack.bsky.social et al. Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For example, you can cut a huge gash and pull out most of the cytoplasm in Stentor and it will flow back in pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24378633/

Simultaneously a really nice portrait, time capsule, and economic manifesto. Mr. Grimes' accent is similar to ones I grew up around as a young boy in Jericho Vermont in the late 1970s. (Probably 5 dairy farms on our dirt road alone, back then; all gone now.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVja...

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

That image is from 1961 and an idealization. Here is an actual trajectory of fixational eye movements. The dots are 2 ms apart. If a midget ganglion cell, with single-cone receptive field, fires at 100 Hz, then every spike reports about a different cone. How can we ever read anything?

In the spirit 👻 of Freaky Friday 🎃, here is a beautiful yet eery video of zebrafish retina development showing horizontal cells (🔵) finding their way out of the crowded amacrine (🟠) layer to settle beneath the photoreceptors. Happy #Halloween! 🎥: PhD student Rae Wong from the @nordenlab.bsky.social

Our paper is out! Take a look if you’re curious to see how we use expansion microscopy on diatoms ☺️ Very excited to keep using this!!

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

What a time to be alive

Thank you so much @wellcometrust.bsky.social for supporting us to push the the limits of #X-ray #nanoimaging and #connectomics, and to make technology more broadly available to the scientific community! 🙏

Nice visualization. Maximize for full effect.

Edward Kravitz, a Harvard biochemist who proved GABA's inhibitory power, passed away last month. He will "be remembered for his humanity, for his social conscience and his desire to help those less fortunate than he,” says Ronald Harris-Warrick. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social bit.ly/479Ggmo