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

I got this in my head and I couldn't focus on work until it existed. Microscopy image file alignment chart, based on how I feel if you give me an image to analyze:

Excited to share that our manuscript "In situ lightfield imaging of octopus locomotion reveals simplified control" has been published in @nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... If you love 🧪🌎🦑🌊, keep reading this thread! 1/n

In case you've ever wondered, I talked with @amjeve.bsky.social about science, myself, and the future of #DevBio as part of the Pathway to Independence Fellowship @biologists.bsky.social 🧪 journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

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...

Incredible — close enough to see, too far away to hear… @capitalweather.bsky.social from Bethesda

Good Science xkcd.com/3101/

Meanwhile, in RI: “Well you drive past the big blue bug and the old Apex building and then turn left at the Dunkin…”

Are all muppets the same species just with wildly different phenotypes like dogs or are there a lot of different species of muppet

Hooding day for @ericfranklin.bsky.social !!!!!!

I was today years old when I learned that the Magic Schoolbus was an NSF-funded project.

Cross-posting from LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/posts/kevin-... These are useful (and free!) websites that I found in my search for all things #zebrafish as part of my Bioinformatics Bootcamp. If there’s enough interest, I may do a blog post on the Node. Enjoy!

PI: "this draft is so great, why didn't we write it this way in the first place??" PhD student: "I did, and then you told me to change it"

When I read ideas about ChatGPT as a replacement for writing, I immediately go to Weick’s explanation of the old adage, “How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?” If it replaces or profoundly shapes the writing process, then it changes the thinking process… which will align w/ its outputs

This time-lapse captures 17 hours of axonal growth from a chicken dorsal root ganglion explant, visualized through the actin cytoskeleton using live confocal imaging. I just submitted this video to the Nikon Small World in Motion competition. Today is the last day to upload yours! 😉 🧪

one of the healthier ways I’ve been managing stress lately is to bottle up all of my rage and anxiety during the day and channel it into watching a baseball game the goddamn Phillies try to lose at 10pm on a weeknight

Our latest manuscript (7 years in the works) tackles the question of how diurnal ground squirrels evolved a cone-dominant retina, in contrast to the ancestral rod-dominant retina retained by virtually all other mammals./1 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An example of what we in the NIH Intramural program can accomplish. Excited to share our latest paper in close collaboration with Nick Ryba's group. We examined how inflammation transforms representation in somatosensory neurons to cause pain. Lots of surprises here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to share a new preprint from my lab! We characterize the on/off kinetics, light dosage-dependence, and more for a suite of optogenetic signaling activators in zebrafish embryos 💡 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It has been a while since I advertised some of the tools we have released to help researchers analyze the zebrafish genome. So a brief Bluetorial on our zebrafish genomics UCSC public data hub and the bigger effort led by @ferencmueller.bsky.social to create a zebrafish ENCODE project (Danio-CODE):

So much joy: my incredible undergrad Marlyn Li from @schoppik.com’s lab is a Goldwater Scholar!!! Check out her profile here 👇 and keep an eye out — she’s applying for MD-PhD programs soon 👀 as.nyu.edu/features/imp... #zebrafish #devbio 🧠

Stepwise photobleaching of the economy

3/3 We are looking for a lab technician, a lab manager and researchers to join us in this new chapter. Read the post here: portugueslab.com/the-lab-is-h... Reach out to us if you are interested.

Zoom-in on zebrafish head development captured with a light-sheet microscope. 🧪 #zebrafish #AcademicSky #DevBio #neuroskyence

Check out these feather buds on the chicken embryo's wing! Our latest study @plosbiology.org reveals that temporary inhibition of sonic hedgehog signalling transforms feathers into simple, protofeather-like structures—similar to those of their dinosaur ancestors🔬🦖🧪 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

Check out my postdoc work at Ariel Levine’s lab, hot and fresh, describing how you build a dorsal horn! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Benjamin Barti at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences - IEM, took this 20X micrograph by confocal microscopy for Nikon's 2018 Photomicrography Competition. You're seeing dye-injected Purkinje cells in a mouse cerebellum. These are some of the largest neurons in the brain.

much needed glimmers!

Celebrate International Women’s Day by following our two Starter Packs with kickass Scientists from the #zebrafish community! 👩‍🔬 🧪 Volume 1: go.bsky.app/4BegEjv Volume 2: go.bsky.app/VoebYrt

Check out the latest preprint from our lab, led by Aytac Kadir Mutlu, on the role of topographically organized dorsal raphe (DRN) activity in regulating forebrain function and adaptive behaviors! 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Once upon a time, in the late 1800s, people in Japan got really into breeding mice. Coloured mice. Patterned mice. Even mice that danced. They became known as Japanese Fancy Mice, and that caught the attention of researchers in Europe and America, who imported them for study. 2/n

How does a neuron get its activity? 👀 Check out our latest preprint, where we tracked the activity of the same neurons throughout early postnatal development: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... see 🧵 (1/?)

In drosophila, by manipulating sets of surface proteins, you can re-engineer connectivity of olfactory neurons and generate a new neuron type that alters courtship behavior. Impressive work from the Luo lab. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Your lab scissors are actually a parafilmase - a highly specialized enzyme that catalyzes the precise cutting of parafilm through a metal-dependent mechanism

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.

I have such a soft spot for Philly sports teams...they just have a vibe like you go to a party and half the guests are feral raccoons and you say what the hell and have such a fun weird time and it is so memorable and in the morning you definitely have to go get some shots.

Sad to report that I am now old enough that 4 hours of skiing requires ibuprofen before & after and also a day lying on a heating pad…

First #fluorescencefriday of my postdoc! It is not the prettiest image I’ve ever taken BUT I overcame some silly apprehension about trying new techniques and that’s what counts! 🧪🧠

So excited to share our first paper from my PhD! Chasing this question was so rewarding; I hope that comes across in the writing. Thank you @denagoldblatt.bsky.social, @cbellegarda.bsky.social, Cheryl, and Başak for being wonderful teammates and @schoppik.bsky.social for the excellent bluetorial 🤓

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

So grateful for so much. Cheers to 2024!

Great new preprint by @felinewlindhout.bsky.social @lancasterlab.bsky.social, demonstrating that evolutionary differences in calcium regulation set the tempo of neuronal development, allowing for more elaborated neuron morphology by extending a critical time window www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Closing out the year, @cbellegarda.bsky.social and @franziau.bsky.social argue that zebrafish have much to teach us about diversity. Well, diversity among motor neurons that move the eyes, anyway 👀. Plus read our opinionated takes on current articles too! authors.elsevier.com/a/1kL%7Eb3Q9...

Happy holidays, happy new year, happy to reintroduce our gerbil vocal dialect paper! Final version now available in eLife elifesciences.org/articles/89892

Merry Christmas! I am *so thrilled* to share my rockstar undergrad Stephanie (now MD-PhD student at NYU) just published her senior thesis as her FIRST 1st author paper -- and my first as senior author! This is the story from my grad work I'm most proud of. Check it out! ⬇️ #zebrafish #devbio 🧠🧪

How can some vertebrates naturally recover from deafness? In work in PNAS, Tuo Shi finds that enhancers for sensory genes remain open but silent in sister cells of zebrafish and lizards, allowing these to make new inner ear sensory hair cells upon damage. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Now that we’re on Bluesky, it’s a good time to bring back #badsciencedrawings – a collection of figures that prove that science is more science than art. Before Biorender, all we had was MS Paint and a dream. But ovals, lines, and lightning bolts were all we needed Morales-Botello et al., 2012