Excited to highlight a new paper from my graduate student Sergio Bernal Garcia who, together withLuke Hammond, developed RESPAN, a new deep-learning pipeline automating the segmentation of neuronal morphology and dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy images: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

My group at Science has been running a big campaign to engineer new channelrhodopsins. Excited to share the first results from it today: a suite of highly sensitive new opsins. We call them "WAChRs". Everyday indoor office lighting is enough to activate them pretty strongly.

Excited to share our latest paper - now out in @science.org - we showed how oxytocin modulates maternally-directed behavior in young mice (P15).

Research with animals is a sensitive topic, and we need to be mindful of how we share these studies with general audiences. Here I only briefly share the papers, but on the blog you can read more about what we learn and why studying animals is important. spikesandbursts.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/n...

Cooperative actions of interneuron families support the hippocampal spatial code: science.org/doi/10.1126/... In vivo optogenetics of interneurons + ephys recordings shows tIme division control of place fields of pyramidal cells: PV first half, Sst and Id2 the second half.

Complementary, alternative and integrative medicine for autism: an umbrella review and online platform www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Widespread cortical representations of innate behaviors in the mouse "We find specific cortical representations of grooming both at a mesoscale network-level and single-cell resolution." elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Resolving synaptic events using subsynaptically targeted GCaMP8 variants "a ratiometric presynaptic GCaMP8m sensor accurately captures (...) presynaptic Ca2+ changes with superior sensitivity and similar kinetics compared to chemical dyes" elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Synaptic transmission is dispensable for selecting the winner input but is crucial for the subsequent events of synapse elimination www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

High-speed voltage imaging of action potentials in molecular layer interneurons reveals sensory-driven synchrony that augments movement: www.cell.com/cell-reports... Voltage imaging of fast-spiking interneurons in the cerebellum with 1-photon imaging at 2-4 kHz.

Personalizing transcranial electrical stimulation www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Induction of plasticity and metaplasticity using noninvasive brain stimulation www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The NIH BRAIN Initiative’s impacts in systems and computational neuroscience and team-scale research 2014–2023 elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Cambrian origin of the arachnid brain: www.cell.com/current-biol... Reconstruction of fossil neural traces in Cambrian chelicerates shows similarities to the brains of living spiders and scorpions. Cool and interesting!

How is prefrontal neural activity refined as we age? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com‬! This study, from Elizabeth Johnson, uncovers how subtle changes in neural 'noise' impact our attention, memory, and cognition through development. Proud to have contributed! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint!

 tl;dr — We ran around late at night to record wild rats in NYC and figured out how to quantify their behavior and environment. 🧵 w/ Dima Batenkov, @zamakany.bsky.social, Emily Mackevicius www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rapid rebalancing of co-tuned ensemble activity in the auditory cortex "non-stimulated co-tuned neurons decreased their tone-evoked activity when the frequency of the presented pure tone matched to their tuning property, while non co-tuned neurons were unaffected elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

A cell type in the visual system that receives feedback about limb movement: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... LT52 neurons in Drosophila visual system are strongly activated when flies groom their heads and driven by a combination of visual and non-visual inputs.

Now online! A postnatal molecular switch drives activity-dependent maturation of parvalbumin interneurons

Learning, prediction accuracy, and neural plasticity in sensory cortex "Here we review studies demonstrating anatomical, synaptic, and task-dependent response plasticity in sensory cortex during learning." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Life without microglia "summarizes evidence from animal models of congenital microglial deficiency that postnatal neuronal development and synaptic refinement do not require the presence of microglia" doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

A novel method for reliably measuring miniature and spontaneous postsynaptic events in whole-cell patch clamp recordings in the central nervous system GUI, Matlab, and Python: github.com/dervinism/mi... www.frontiersin.org/journals/cel...

Spontaneous movements and their relationship to neural activity fluctuate with latent engagement states www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Activity-dependent development of synaptic circuits mediates direction selectivity in an axis-specific manner: doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... "before the onset of vision, spontaneous activity selectively influences the formation of precise wiring essential for motion detection along the horizontal axis."

Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function?: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... "We perform a meta-analysis of 140 datasets published between 2003 and 2024. We find that a long-standing controversy is the product of a methodological choice with no bearing on underlying dynamics."

Three-photon microscopy: an emerging technique for deep intravital brain imaging: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Review of the principles and applications of three-photon (3P) microscopy.

Inferring internal states across mice and monkeys using facial features "we identify, on a single-trial basis, a set of internal states that reliably predicts when the animals are going to react to the presented stimuli." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Structure–function coupling in the first month of life: Associations with age and attention "age is associated with “decoupling” of patterns of functional from structural connectivity in neonates" doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism "Mice harboring mutations in Fmr1, Cntnap2 or Shank3B show a blunted update of priors during decision-making." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our Science paper on HaloDA1.0-the first genetically encoded far-red dopamine sensor! 🥳It enables powerful multiplex imaging in neurons, brain slices, and live animals.🧠🔬 #GRABsensors #Dopamine www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It is out! Read how you achieve 1.7 mm deep 3-photon imaging in prefrontal cortex with dendritic spine resolution over a week. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

New blog post: Calcium imaging makes brain activity glow spikesandbursts.wordpress.com/2025/06/01/c...

Duplication of the autism-related gene Chd8 leads to behavioral hyperactivity and neurodevelopmental defects in mice www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The history and future of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very happy that this work is finally out in ‪@pnas.org‬! We show that synaptic and intrinsic forms of homeostatic plasticity sense distinct aspects of network activity, and can thus be independently recruited by distinct network functions. A thread: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

NIH killed grants on orders from Elon Musk’s DOGE. Story by @maxkozlov.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is fun: See how the cover designs of @science.org have evolved over the past 145 years. www.science.org/content/blog...

Molecular states underlying neuronal cell type development and plasticity in the postnatal whisker cortex "Unlike primary visual cortex, however, cell type maturation in whisker somatosensory cortex is not substantially dependent on sensory experience" t.co/xLfM83Wv0F

A reduced ability to discriminate social from non-social touch at the circuit level may underlie social avoidance in autism: nature.com/articles/s41... Results suggest that "a reduced capacity to represent social stimuli at the circuit level may underlie social avoidance in autism."

Modulating cortical excitability and cortical arousal by pupil self-regulation: nature.com/articles/s41... Pupil self-regulation modulated electrophysiological markers of cortical excitability, cortical arousal, and stimulus evaluation.

Network influence determines the impact of cortical ensembles on stimulus detection: cell.com/neuron/fullt... "Mice detect stimuli by reading out all V1 activity, not by weighting key neurons"

We’re excited to share the full lineup for the Gordon Research Conferences on Inhibition in the CNS. It’s the perfect opportunity to network, explore cutting-edge research, and share your own work with a vibrant community. Applications are still open! Feel free to reach out with any questions!

Light-microscopy-based connectomic reconstruction of mammalian brain tissue rdcu.be/ek8GG Wow! 😍

1/10 Our latest research, led by @martijnselten.bsky.social, identifies a mechanism through which Parvalbumin (PV) interneurons regulate their activity in the #cortex. This is the story @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... ⬇︎ 🧵 @devneuro.bsky.social @kingsioppn.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu

Phylogenetic divergence of GABAB receptor signaling in neocortical networks over adult life "Postsynaptic GABABR differentially control pyramidal cell activity within the cortical column as a function of age in rodents, but minimally change over adult life in humans" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Just uploaded a simple script to run cellpose for cell segmentation on two-photon calcium imaging data and extract ΔF/F traces. It runs slower without a GPU, but still works well. Check it out and give it a try! github.com/dav1dcg/neur...

Nonneuronal contributions to synaptic function www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

A brief history of GFP press.asimov.com/articles/gfp...