📣 Exciting news: my lab is moving to the Krembil Institute at the University of Toronto’s University Health Network in Fall 2026. We’ll be recruiting for all roles, so reach out if you’re interesting in joining us to study spinal circuits for sensorimotor control www.levine-lab.org

In vivo imaging of zebrafish spinal cord neural circuit development, captured with adaptive optical lattice light-sheet microscopy. Credit to Eric Betzig @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

Our new work goes from genes to behavior to understand the molecular underpinnings of the most common childhood disorder of vision: strabismus. Led by UCSF-bound Emily Gershowitz & Kyla Hamling, plus rockstars @denagoldblatt.bsky.social & @paigel.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mammals have hundreds of joints and muscles. Controlling them individually would be nearly impossible. How does the nervous system organize such complexity into coherent actions? Our new study explores this question through a natural behavior: jumping.

Check out the newest work from our, from Fabricio Nicola @fabricionicola.bsky.social on mouse jumping and spinal cell types. Excellent collab with @vulcnethologist.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This one is extra special: my rockstar former UG (now MD-PhD!) Stephanie's first 1st author paper, and my first as senior author, is now out in Development!

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

Nature research paper: Rewiring an olfactory circuit by altering cell-surface combinatorial code go.nature.com/3MbCoZT

Excited to share this work where we found how fish swim differently to keep balance in the dark / explore more in the light. Spoiler: ever wonder what they do during “little pauses” between swims? They are counting!

I've updated my Bioinformatics Bootcamp: Zebrafish Special Edition blog post on @the-node.bsky.social! Please do share with trainees or anyone new to the community. I hope it adds some breadth to the many resources available to #zebrafish researchers. 🔗 thenode.biologists.com/bioinformati...

Thread coming soon, but be the first to read the latest from @franziau.bsky.social!

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.