Have you ever wondered how the brain should represent the sensory world in order to generate behavior? Read our new preprint: work by Shuhong Huang shuhonghuang.bsky.social with our long-standing collaborator James Fitzgerald at Northwestern.

“ok so this is embarrassing but just for the record and just so we have it, your C.V says "Nature Scientific Reports"? sorry to have to even ask”

Excited to share our new preprint! We explore the link between the locus coeruleus (LC) and arousal for astrocytes, pyramidal cells, interneurons in the hippocampus. A fantastic collaboration with @sianduss.bsky.social @bohaceklab.bsky.social, and many others: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/5

Supplementary figure 16

Instead, fish seemed to remap 180º of the visual space onto the 360º extent of their neural compass, effectively "considering" the two suns as an identical object. This shows the surprising capacity of the HD cells to rapidly pick up the correlation structure of the visual inputs.

Lu, Schultz, Kozlov, Astrocytes and neurons exhibit partially shared but distinct composite receptive fields for natural stimuli Now published in J Neurophys journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1...

In @elife.bsky.social: Pallium-encoded valence-specific chemosensory amplification of eye-body coordination in larval zebrafish doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

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

Okay, well, I painted some new neurons in burnt sienna and black #sciart

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

Surprise mother$#@%er! Q: What does this mean for neural systems to understand them? A: We absolutely need the wiring diagram. All synapses, chemical and electrical. #Connectomics

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

"My New Year's Resolution is to find a principled way to think about all those cell types in the brain" Why friend, you are in luck, because @rgast.bsky.social has just the perspective for you: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Glutamate is the primary molecule that neurons use to communicate with each other. Previously, scientists have mostly recorded when neurons fire output signals, but now with a new glutamate indicator, they can record the many inputs that causes cells to fire. 🧵 #neuroskyence

I don't always get pretty, isolated, AND transfected primary neurons in culture, but when I do I take advantage.... Rat hippocampal neuron overexpressing ThymosinB4-mScarlet and imaged for 16hr on a @zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social LSM880 with Airyscan. #FluorescenceFriday #Microscopy

Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, et al.

Really enjoyed highlighting this work by @vmsruetten.bsky.social from @mishaahrens.bsky.social lab for preLights. WHOLISTIC! A whole-body functional atlas of cellular dynamics. Lots of cool things in the preprint. @hhmijanelia.bsky.social @prelights.bsky.social

A paper from my PhD lab is on Science! This is a really cool new way to utilize EM connectome datasets. Congrats to the team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check out our newest issue where we interview @juliesemmelhack.bsky.social, who studies the neural circuits of visual behavior at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. www.cell.com/current-biol...

It's finally out! Our paper on optogenetic interrogation of the lateral line: www.cell.com/iscience/ful... This one involved a lot of sweat and tears, and it was a real tour de force. It was also the last paper we got to write with Jim, so it's a special one (and hence, the tears).

The fun leaving your body the moment you're done with the science and it's time to get it published

We are very excited: @hannazwaka.bsky.social has been awarded a Leibniz Best Minds grant as a Junior Research Group Leader! Five years of independent research, tenure track and part of the Best Minds network – a real boost for her career.

You're not you when you're hungry... and neither is a zebrafish! Our new paper shows that hunger completely overrides the instinct to flee, making zebrafish approach potential threats instead. "Hunger shapes predator avoidance in zebrafish." @zebrafishrock.bsky.social 🐟 doi.org/10.1080/0394...

when someone tells me not to use em dashes because AI uses em dashes

(1/n) We are excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications, by Hagar Lavian (@hlavian.bsky.social) and team, revealing how the zebrafish brain integrates visual navigation signals! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Like most animals, fish move less at night. Underwater, stable posture requires movement. Find out how fish don't fall down at night in: Lighting and circadian cues shape locomotor strategies for balance and navigation in larval zebrafish from @yunluzhu.bsky.social doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The changes we experience may be the source of our subjective experience of time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Going to the lab during the weekend to do cell culture work and trying to do everything at double speed

Writing the “Alternative Plans” part of the grant

Now published in Molecular Metabolism, improved by the helpful reviewers! We hope to continue to leverage the #zebrafish to understand the neurometabolic and hormonal regulation of appetite and beyond! Read the full article here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

✨ New preprint ✨ What if we could watch AND control thousands of individual neurons in behaving mice—with stable access over months? 🧠⚡ Our work introduces transgenic all-optical tools that make this possible - and a resulting surprising discovery! 🔭💡 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/13 🧵

How does a fish know when to blend in? Scientists identified a key circuit controlling camouflage in zebrafish – from cells in the retina sensing light to nerve cells in the brain controlling the release of a hormone that pales the skin to match bright backgrounds. www.bi.mpg.de/news/2025-11...

Excited to share our paper now published in Cell! 'Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background' Huge thanks to @neurofishh.bsky.social & @teuler.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social 👇🏻 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Thank you so much for featuring our study🙏

Found them: the brain's specific "go" neurons for swimming. @fumikubo.bsky.social team discovers the inhibitory pretextal cells essential for optomotor response, dissociating it from eye movements. A stunning map from function to molecular identity. Thrilled to highlight this work! 🐟

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social led by Kaarthik A Balakrishnan: We identify medullary circuits that represent the valence of thermal stimuli and control both long-term strategies of cold-avoidance and short term hot avoidance behaviors to enable thermoregulation. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Witnessed an Orchestra for the first time 'Silk Notes From Pipa'. Simply beautiful. Definition of teamwork and synchronicity.

Naturalistic approaches such as Ulanovsky’s open up “potential opportunities to really reveal why the brain is structured in the way it’s structured,” says Iain Couzin. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neuroetholog...

"Fishman", proposal for a journal cover. Commissioned by MY Dennis' lab @mydennis.bsky.social for a study focused on identifying human-specific gene duplications and their role in brain evolution using genomics and zebrafish as model. @dcsoto.bsky.social #art #digitalart #sciart #fish

Just out in Nature! “The astrocytic ensemble acts as a multiday trace to stabilize memory.” We identified astrocytic ensembles that link experiences across days to stabilize memory nature.com/articles/s41.... New astrocyte tools are openly available at Addgene: addgene.org/Jun_Nagai/. 1/8

Cool work! from Engert Lab

My first paper is out! “Social maintenance masks induced aggression in zebrafish” — research from my internship in the Neuronal Plasticity Group on how social context can suppress aggression. #zebrafishrocks 🐟 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/8 How can the brain create countless unique memories using a single, universal metric of space? We’ve been waiting for the answer to this for two decades! Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(edited repost) Thrilled to see our computational work on adaptive shaping of behavior (we call it outcome-based curriculum learning) in PLoS Comp Biol! @wl-tong.bsky.social, @gautamreddy.bsky.social & I formalize curricula in any RL task that can be framed as sequential simple-to-complex behavior.

In this month’s “Liftoff,” @matthiasnau.bsky.social talks about the importance of making quick decisions as a PI, and @kmcostalab.com shares how lab members being mad at a PI can sometimes be a good thing. By @franciscorr25.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/liftoff-new-...

Hierarchical processing of sensory information across topographically organized thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.15.675867v1

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...

Beyond Locomotion: How Specialized Motor Rhythms Enable Vertebrate Escape from Capture https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.08.674955v1

(4/8) Beyond neural predictions, POCO's learned unit embeddings independently reproduce brain region clustering without any anatomical labels. That means at single-cell resolution across entire brains, POCO mimics biological organization purely from neural activity patterns ✨