🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

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...

More new science from the lab! Led by @nathancsharris.bsky.social (now at GA State) and PD Priya Dutta. We describe how experience tunes the ratios of functional receptors in a single sensory neuron via coordinating transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms to drive response plasticity.

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

Some parts of the Drosophila olfactory circuit have evolved more than others, according to a new comparison of two fruit fly species’ connectomes. By @martajhill.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/c...

Well, none of us may ever get funded again but in the meantime, here's some new science! Led by recent PhD Anjali Pandey w/ex-UG Maya Katz. Here we identify an asymmetric molecular mechanism that underlies symmetric context-dependent sensory plasticity in the AWC olfactory neuron pair in C. elegans

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

Very cool new paper by @thegulab.bsky.social published in Cell, showing that arterial endothelial coupling via gap junctions determines the speed and spread of vasodilation induced by neuronal activity ! #cerebrovascular #bloodflow #endothelium

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This research has widespread implications for treatments of chronic pain, autistic hypersensitivity, sexual dysfunction, and other ailments. @harvardmed.bsky.social news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

What’s in a sniff? Wonderful new work from Kevin Franks revealing the mechanisms for responding to odour molecules at different stages of the respiration cycle. UK Semiochemical Network Workshop in Cambridge

Finally out! 🥳 Our paper showing how a transposable element (TE) insertion can cause developmental phenotypes is now published @natgenet.nature.com 🧬🦠🐁 Below is a brief description of the major findings. Check the full version of the paper for more details: www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02248-5

Franklin W. Stahl, 95, Dies; Helped Create a ‘Beautiful’ DNA Experiment www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/s...

Just noticed that Stavros has put out another 'solid' paper last month. 🔥 Impressive given what he has to deal with these days. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it. In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2) 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very happy to see a Transmitter (@thetransmitter.bsky.social) piece on our recent work on estrous cycle modulation of hippocampal structure and function. Thanks to Sydney Wyatt (@sydneywyatt.bsky.social) for covering the work and its context: www.thetransmitter.org/neuroendocri...

Animals’ sniffing drives rhythmic input to the olfactory system. How does this timing contribute to perception, especially beyond first steps of olfactory processing? We tested this using simple closed-loop optogenetics in our new paper: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

How do brain circuits evolve? We started looking for some answers by using synapse-resolution cross-species comparative connectomics on an entire olfactory circuit 👇 bit.ly/44aVm9E

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/...

1/ I'm excited to share recent results from my first collaboration with the amazing @anayebi.bsky.social and @leokoz8.bsky.social ! We show how autonomous behavior and whole-brain dynamics emerge in embodied agents with intrinsic motivation driven by world models.

A very nice article about our research on the octopus visual system, by @callimcflurry.bsky.social @thetransmitter.bsky.social

More evidence for altered sensory processing in ASD- great story! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Preprint alert! 🚨 Can mice estimate the distance to an odour source? New work led by Cristina Marin and colleagues, jointly supervised by @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social at the @crick.ac.uk and myself. Spoiler alert: Yes, they can! Read the paper here: bit.ly/43A9tF9 Short 🧵 below

Online now:

Impressive study in @nature from my colleague Marcus Stephenson-Jones at UCL in the @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n

🚨Very excited to share a new paper from our lab in Neuron (@cp-neuron.bsky.social) on the influence of the estrous cycle on structural and functional plasticity in the hippocampus: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Thread below 🧠🧪🧵:

Maps are everywhere in the brain...and finally we've discovered one in the nose! Led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social, we uncovered the logic that specifies the positions of each of the 1,000 sensory neuron subtypes in the nose and aligns their projections to the brain.👇👃see more details below👃👇

Each worm lab selects a 2-3 letter allele designation. I was coming to Brandeis so I picked 'oy'. I finally have a worm colleague in my Dept - Josh Meisel - who is fabulous btw. I just convinced him to pick 'vey'. Now we need to make a double mutant. (Yes - I am very pleased with myself).

The feeling of a hug comes from the pressure and vibration of millions of nerve endings.

Calling all science advocates!! Carlos Brody+ are creating a searchable database of tangible science benefits, and they need you. publicusaresearchbenefits.com They are asking for suggestions - from brief to lengthy. The database is state-searchable, so all 50 states. Please spread the word!

#preprint: We mapped the structure and function of olfactory bulb circuits with in vivo 2-photon microscopy and synchrotron #Xray holographic nanotomography. doi.org/10.1101/2025... @yuxinzhang.bsky.social @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social @apacureanu.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @esrf.fr

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...

🦇👂🧠Our first bat paper is out! 🧠👂🦇 How do bats tell navigation from social calls? Led by the fearless Dr. Jenni Lawlor, we used 2P imaging to show that the auditory midbrain encodes categorical primitives. Check it out @natneuro.nature.com: rdcu.be/ehEgz

With Butovsky Lab, we show that silencing TIM-3 in brain-resident immune cells prevents neurodegeneration in a mouse model of #Alzheimer’s disease. Deletion of TIM-3 in microglia enhance phagocytic clearance of toxic amyloid beta. #Immunosky🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint ✍️🚨 ✨Ontogeny of tactile, vocal and kinship dynamics in rat pup huddling -Huddle dynamics develop w/o kinship selectivity -Vocal/internal-state quiets w/ huddling & kin/ touch in yng pups tinyurl.com/y7vhkwjc 👏 @flor-bela.bsky.social @hughtakemoto.bsky.social @kinshiplab.bsky.social

Convo at faculty meeting led to my getting Eve Marder interested in worms! Check out our collaborative theory paper providing an explanation for how the unusual properties of the EXP-2 K+ channel could maintain robustness of pharyngeal pumping to environmental noise. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint out! We developed a behavioural platform for the kinematic analysis of skilled whole body behaviour. Very fun collaboration with Christopher Black, @liamebrowne.bsky.social and Rob Brownstone.

My talk at COSYNE is up: "Discrete actions are a unit of both behavior and evolutionary selection" with @akautt.bsky.social and @dattalab.bsky.social www.youtube.com/live/Y8Ke6HC...

Some much needed good news these days at Columbia. Happy to see this paper in @nature.com from the lab of my fellow junior faculty member Vikram Gadagkar. It's been fun to see versions of this work develop over the past few years.

My BFFL Marco Gallio, @mlcapek.bsky.social, and colleagues just dropped an absolute banger of a paper in @nature.com! The Evanston flylords reveal the molecular and neuronal basis of thermal niche adaptation in drosophilid flies. A must-read! 🔥🔥 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Please register to be a donor. I did this back in college. Took like 15 minutes and have been on the registry ever since.

I went to Boston yesterday to give a talk about forgotten airborne science that took place there 90 years ago. Thanks to the Harvard Crimson for this story about how this lost science links tightly to bird flu, NIH cuts, and other current news. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Thanks to @science.org for this kind review. "The final three chapters of Air-Borne constitute the most comprehensive scientific history of COVID-19 that I have read." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New preprint: a simple method (ADePT) for optical control and recording of activity by axially-decoupling the focal planes for widefield patterned photo-stimulation and two photon imaging. Proof-of-principle analysis of functional connectivity in the olfactory bulb. 1/7 #neuroscience

A two-and-a-half-year-old girl shows no signs of a rare genetic disorder, after becoming the first person to be treated for the motor-neuron condition while in the womb. https://go.nature.com/41a7Zzj

1/ Our paper appeared in @Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... w/ Fiete Lab and @khonamikail.bsky.social . Explains emergence of multiple grid cell modules, w/ excellent match to data! Novel mechanism for applying across vast systems from development to ecosystems. 🧵👇

Scripps Research mourns the passing of Floyd E. Bloom, MD, a pioneering neuroscientist and former chair of Neuropharmacology. At Scripps Research, he advanced research on neurotransmitters, addiction, and brain function, shaping modern neuroscience. More:

Amidst all the terrible things, it's nice to have some good news - our paper on the architecture of fly taste circuits is published now! Led by Emory undergrad Sydney Walker and grad student Marco Peña Garcia. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Summary here: devinenilab.org/news/connect...