Why do some worms graze on bacteria while others hunt and kill? Our study, published today in Nature, reveals how predatory aggression evolved in nematodes. Led by @gunizgozeeren.bsky.social and @leoboeger.bsky.social across the @jameslightfoot.bsky.social and @monikakscholz.bsky.social labs.

Circadian timing shapes infection outcomes. In our new paper, we show that baseline inflammatory state—measurable before infection—strongly predicts which individuals will survive a bacterial challenge. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI? ➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com rdcu.be/eWVmA

Moments that brought joy in this otherwise rollercoaster of a year. All spotted in the greater Boston area.

How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...

Thrilled to share our new paper! With @tomtom-auer.bsky.social team, we asked how #evolution reshapes what animals #eat to match their ecological niches. Using pan-neuronal Ca2+ imaging, we show that the changes are in how the brain processes #taste. Link @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ive seen this work from Prof Liqun Luo’s presented a few times now and its stunning and heroic.

What a gem from @dudinlab.bsky.social @gautamdey.bsky.social @centriolelab.bsky.social in Cell! Expansion microscopy atlas of >200 eukaryotes comparing cytoskeletal architectures revealing structures not seen before. Stunning visualisation! Exactly the kind of transformative cell biology we need.

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint: “Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

Our group at the Allen Institute is recruiting a technician and postdoc to work on light microscopy-based connectomics. Please DM me or share with anyone you think may be interested in this NIH BRAIN CONNECTS funded project.

Roseate spoonbills will splash their wings through the water as part of their beauty routine. Here's one doing so mid-splash, facing straight ahead towards the camera. I really love this shot. #birds

Truly impressive number of birds migrating tonight. More than 800 MILLION birds up in the air right now❗ #BirdMigration

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 🧵]

Very excited to share this finding from my postdoctoral work that is now published in #ScienceAdvances. We show how the gut’s epithelium modifies enteric behaviors during nutritional adversity via distinct peptidergic signaling axes. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Thread ⬇️ (1/n)

Such a "cheesy" story!

Please help me to celebrate Mei Zhen, an innovator and tremendous collaborator, named to the Royal Society of Canada Academy of Science on September 4, 2025

Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

Exciting new Ruta lab preprint by @annaryba.bsky.social et al. on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation: Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution Drosophila www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint: Scientists, how many times has this happened to you? You collect all kinds of data from a camera or microscope. But then you are faced with an analysis pipeline that threatens to take 100x longer than collecting the data did!

The pipeline is hardware-agnostic, scales to system capabilities, and will improve along with the underlying foundation models. Very little fine tuning is required to tailor it to a large range of use cases. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The funds are approved! We're hiring a postdoc to build a CRISPRa toolkit to identify new aging mechanisms in C. elegans. Email or DM me to find out more. Please share & repost!

Happy to share our publication - Comparative connectomics of two distantly related nematode species reveals patterns of nervous system evolution www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social

Hard to remember that just 12 years ago there was no @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social and almost no one in the biology community preprinted their work. What a long way we’ve come. @reinierprosee.bsky.social and I wrote a thing about how @biologists.bsky.social embraced the preprint world

C. elegans enthusiasts - join me and @stern-lab.bsky.social ‪‪for a pre #worm25 meeting online workshop on *Monitoring inter-individual diversity across multiple levels and timescales* - Jun 26, 2025 12:30 PM Eastern Time us06web.zoom.us/j/8544967372... please share!

I will be opening my new lab in September at UBC! if you’re coming to #Worm25 and are looking for graduate studies or a postdoc position, let’s meet! Vancouver + worms = perfect vibes. www.zoology.ubc.ca/~yeecs/labsi... Please share! 🙌

This is so cool - octopus can sense microbiomes: sending a gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/s...

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 1975 "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Space Oddity" were on the UK top 100, and Ward, Thomson, White, and Brenner published the first reconstruction of the C. elegans sensory anatomy. A short 50 years later, we reconstructed the same neurons and glia in the embryo: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Move over, starling murmurations. There’s a slimier, squirmier collective behavior in town. It's a living, twisting tower of worms. Everybody, meet the wormuration 🪱🪱 Latest paper by Daniela Perez, Serena Ding and team @uni-konstanz.de Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... youtube.com/shorts/F8QVc...

A vital and very enjoyable component of my academic work is teaching students at all levels how to extend the frontiers of knowledge. So I’m pleased to announce a set of Jupyter notebooks organized around our ideas for “physics of behavior”. You can find them here: github.com/oist/Physics...

𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗹 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸? Don't expect simple mappings between mind and brain. Check out this piece I wrote for Aeon. aeon.co/essays/how-t...

We only have a couple of spots open for the GRS in Neuroethology. If you've been thinking about registering, now's the time - don't wait for the deadline! Join us for an inspiring meeting in beautiful Tuscany this June! 🌞🍝🍕 Check out the exciting program here: www.grc.org/neuroetholog...

Love worms, molecular genetics, and big questions? We’re hiring a postdoc to build a CRISPRa toolkit to identify new aging mechanisms in C. elegans. Email or DM me to find out more. Please share & repost!

For the cost of the commerical system that I bought in 2013 and I have no use for 99% of its features, you can make like 10 custom, purpose-built microscopes. LEDs are cheap, cameras are cheap, software is free.

“Relevant computations happen in here too” Maimon on the limitations of pure connectivity data in the fly

Nice story on @sreeparnap.bsky.social's postdoc work!

Thrilled to share this in its final, published form! Huge thanks to the reviewers for their insightful feedback—it truly opened up exciting new directions! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pivoting from current events to some current science! Excited to share this pre-print where we had the opportunity to collaborate with @jsrinivasanwpi.bsky.social! We introduce a technique that I hope will transform the way we study neuropeptides in C. elegans. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

New worm lab announcement! Can't wait to see the awesome science from your lab @csybio.bsky.social 🎉

Whether science majors become scientists or not, we are failing to help them become scientifically literate citizens if we are not teaching them what science is and how it works in practice and in sociopolitical context, as opposed to just the content of science. And this is the time to do it. /3

A large portion of grants awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health cannot be funded for the foreseeable future because of an indefinite hold on submissions to the Federal Register, according to an email reviewed by The Transmitter. By @avaskham.bsky.social bit.ly/3X8ngz8

This is at the heart of the grief we feel at the firing of Federal scientists. Scientists go to school and train for years, and mostly don’t get rich or work easy hours. Why? Because we get to look at the stars. We get to ask questions, and to try to use the answers to help people.

Every scientist, long before they were a scientist, was a little kid who stood in front of a fish tank or stared up at the stars or turned over a rock to look at the bugs underneath and said “wow”. On the best days, working in science still feels like that.

NIH grants peeps are working hard, on a Sunday night, trying to get our grants out to us as their world is in chaos. We owe them all a huge debt. Science peeps: be sure to send your grants personnel (grants management, POs and SROs) a note of encouragement and gratitude. @sarathomasy.bsky.social

Excited see the final portion of my PhD work with Vanessa Ruta out today in @cellpress.bsky.social, in the midst of everything. In time for valentines day, @rufeili.bsky.social and I describe how competition between males sculpt mating decisions in 🪰🫶. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...