Many wild populations are fragmenting and declining, leading to inbreeding. We are studying how animals avoid inbreeding and the consequences of inbreeding an in a >20 year study of >20,000 wild mice with whole genomes. We are recruiting a postdoc at Columbia and two PhD students in U Zurich.

@jlarsch.bsky.social and I are organising the 2026 CIG Symposium on June 11-12 in Lausanne on "Information transfer: from genes to behaviour", featuring an eclectic set of brilliant scientists. Details and registration here (abstracts by May 1, registration by June 1): www.unil.ch/fbm/en/home/...

It's out! Happy to present ITEC, a semi supervised algorithm with an extremely low error rate that can track cells in files of any size (think Terabytes!). We used it in many organisms, including zebrafish, to study how organs form and linked it to gene expression www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... +🧪

Very grateful to everyone who made this work possible. I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with such an amazing team. Special thanks to: Jakob El Kholtei, KJ Jenie, @mcolomerr.bsky.social, and of course our wonderful collaborator Bogdan Bintu and my mentor @schierlab.bsky.social

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be starting my lab as a SNSF starting grant professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics in Lausanne! I'm looking for PhD students who are fascinated about the neuronal basis of behaviour across species @fbm-unil.bsky.social

First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here: rdcu.be/eX1L4

Deadline for this post-doc position in my lab extended to Jan 11th!

Exciting new #Zebrafish research from the #WeinsteinLab, led by Jong Park! “Specialized gas-exchange endothelium of the zebrafish gill” — www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Amazing to see red blood cells moving through the gills! Don’t forget to check out the supplemental movies ;-)

Slow-mo video of zebrafish mating. Credit to @zebrafish007.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

Having personally sworn for years that insects don’t use GPCRs for odour detection, Suguru Takagi (@sugurutakagi.bsky.social) discovers that, in fact, they sometimes do … www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“Blame your parents if you can’t pay enough attention." At least when you are a zebrafish! Our new study on attentional switching together with Kumaresh Krishnan, @paulapflitsch.bsky.social , @zwitscherarmin.bsky.social and Florian Engert is out in Science Advances: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

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...

Apply now for FBM #PhD #Fellowships in #Life #Sciences – join one of the Faculty’s leading laboratories. 🚨 Application deadline for fellowships: October 6, 2025. ➡️ www.unil.ch/news/en/1756... @unil.bsky.social @dmf-unil.bsky.social @dee-unil.bsky.social @dib-unil.bsky.social #fbm #unil

Check out this exciting study led by Anh-Tuan Trinh from our lab, where we investigated how thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish pallium receive, represent, and integrate sensory information: 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

BonnBrain 2026 is a go! March 23–25, Bonn (DZNE, Bonn, Germany). Apply now: www.bonnbrain.de Limited slots. Presentations (posters/talks) selected from submitted abstracts. Keynotes & invited speakers 👇

Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415... with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social

Jim was an incredibly gifted teacher. Still remember his fundamentals in Neuroscience. Also, great, dry sense of humor.

Latest from the lab. Beautiful work from Joanna Lau and a fantastic collaboration with James Fitzgerald. www.cell.com/current-biol...

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...

If you’re interested in ants, olfaction, gene regulation, or all of the above, here’s a new preprint from the lab for you. It describes an unorthodox mechanism of transcriptional interference by which ant olfactory sensory neurons produce a single functional receptor. 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

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

💡 Whether you’re a new student, a lab leader or a decision-maker at an institutional level, you can now find free tools and guidance all in one place on our new Learning Resources page. With everything in the thread below and more, get learning today! buff.ly/sIpX5gU

Latest from my lab: we identify and characterize the function of binocular neurons zebrafish larvae use to hunt prey; sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Congrats to Richard Tian, Gewei Yan and Tommy Lam @tkclam.bsky.social!

How does the brain work in natural scenarios, in multi-animal societies of wild animals? 🧠 🧪 🦇 doi.org/10.1126/scie... (1/n)

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Great job opportunity at The Center for Integrative Genomics, Lausanne University, Switzerland unil.ch/cig/en/home.... For a tenure-track Assistant Professor position. More details for how to apply are here nature.com/naturecareer...

Become our colleague! Tenure-track Assistant Professor position at The Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. unil.ch/cig/en/home.... More details for how to apply are here: www.nature.com/naturecareer...

We are looking for a new neuroscience colleague at the tenure track assistant professor level! All details below! 🧠🔥 All details here: www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

Congrats to @stednitz.bsky.social and Andrew Lesak on their @currentbiology.bsky.social paper! They use HMM to identify two interaction states in #zebrafish: one visual for long-range interactions and one lateral line for quick, close interactions. Free link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lCYh3QW8S...

Heart disease is the world’s leading killer, and tackling it demands decoding the multi-gene networks driving disease progression 🫀 Learn how researchers used Medaka fish plus high-throughput heartbeat imaging to build a biomarker toolkit for early screening. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are proud to present our new preprint “Correlative light and electron microscopy reveals the fine circuit structure underlying evidence accumulation in larval zebrafish”, just posted on bioRxiv (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). (1/10)

1/3 Starting this summer, and after 11 wonderful years in Munich, the Portugues Lab will be starting a new adventure at the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior (NBB) (nbb.cornell.edu) at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Interested in understanding how brains control social behavior? Join S19 in Hall 101: ‘Visual processing in social behaviors’ to learn how animals&humans perceive and react to social motion, Speakers: Akhila Mudunuri, clara.howcroft.bsky.social, jlarsch.bsky.social, Winrich Freiwald, Marina Pavlova

After last week publication from the lab on circuits of social isolation/satiety, today we publish a different line of research by @harriskaplan.bsky.social et al., on the development trajectories of hypothalamic POA cell types driving survival and social behavior. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8

Please look at the 🧵 from @dingliu.bsky.social summarizing our discovery of brain-wide circuits controlling the emergence and satiation of social drive during social isolation vs grouping

Rewiring an olfactory circuit by altering the combinatorial code of cell-surface proteins https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.01.640986v1

Big paper from @paigel.bsky.social in our lab: Sensory feedback is always crucial for proper development, right? Wrong! Crazier still, the motor system is the slowest part of a developing reflex circuit! Surprises abound in this bluetorial c’mon along…. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/19

Excited to share our new paper in Nature! 'Transcriptomic neuron types vary topographically in function and morphology' explores how neurons in the zebrafish optic tectum exhibit diverse functions and shapes despite similar transcriptional profiles. 🔗 rdcu.be/d9GVM

Come join us! Please repost 🙏🏼

I'm thrilled to announce that our paper describing Marigold, a free machine learning-based webapp for zebrafish behavioral analysis, is officially published! Marigold features a user friendly graphical user interface to enable training of a neural network for analyzing behavioral recordings.

Behavioural experiments in shell-dwelling cichlid fish reveal evolutionary adaptations in parents and offspring that control the timing of emergence from the nest https://go.nature.com/3EaV3Bp

Humans and other animals take turns during conversations. In our new paper we study the aggressive visual conversations of betta fish. We discover how fish know when is their turn and how the telencephalon is not needed! 🧪 www.cell.com/cell-reports... More details in 🧵 ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/bend...

New pre-print: an one-stop shop for everything you wanted to know about the fly olfactory system: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New pre-print #2: Jérôme Mermet profiles living and dying lineages in the olfactory system to begin to explain how these sensory pathways are robustly specified but also evolvable: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ok, this just posted. It's a sincere question, and I'm hoping that responses to it/discussions of it will clarify questions that many of us have about claims being made about putatively disruptive effects of AI on how we think about the brain. doi.org/10.21428/8e6...

One of the weirder scholarly practices regarding generative AI that seems to have been normalized is citing chatbots. I say normalized because many univs & scholarly associations recommend it as an element of proper scholarship. But it doesn't make sense when you consider what a citation means. 1/