1/8 Breathing seems automatic. But it's a finely tuned motor behavior that has to be controlled. In this preprint, I map the circuits that match a fly's respiration to the metabolic demands of flight and mitigate the risk of dehydration. 🧵🪰 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We are looking for other scientifically curious and creative team players with diverse perspectives to build up our group across all levels. If you are interested in joining or collaborating, please check out our website (www.schretterlab.org) and feel free to reach out (cschretter at smu.edu).

Schretter Lab

schretterlab.org

New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Nearly a decade after starting the project, the first major results from our comparative connectomics work is online! Comparing the head direction circuits of the central complex in bees, ants and flies, recapitulating >300million years of evolution.

👇👇👇 And don’t miss the appendix, especially if you’re a fellow bumpologist. They saved some cool ideas for the end. It’s a great read.

Adrian Duszkiewicz@adrian-du.bsky.social · 3w ago

Functional Logic of a Cognitive Brain System for Navigation A fascinating review of the Drosophila head-direction system by Gaby Maimon and Larry Abbott #neuroskyence #compneuro

Very exciting to see our work being highlighted by @thetransmitter.bsky.social! Thanks to Natalia Mesa, and as always thanks to our collaborators in the Jayaraman lab!… back to grinding away at reviewer experiments

Yvette Fisher@yvetteefisher.bsky.social · 4w ago

Thank you Natalia Mesa at the @thetransmitter.bsky.social for highlighting our labs preprint on synaptic mechanisms of head direction learning!! 🪰🧭 Work from @markplitt.bsky.social in my lab in collaboration with the Jayaraman lab! www.thetransmitter.org/learning-and...

Thank you Natalia Mesa at the @thetransmitter.bsky.social for highlighting our labs preprint on synaptic mechanisms of head direction learning!! 🪰🧭 Work from @markplitt.bsky.social in my lab in collaboration with the Jayaraman lab! www.thetransmitter.org/learning-and...

Unique learning mechanism drives navigation in fruit flies

The neuromodulator octopamine, the insect counterpart to norepinephrine, helps flies get their bearings in an unfamiliar environment.

thetransmitter.org

This paper is an absolutely beautiful combination of a deep set of cognitive ideas, a super creative task, a surprisingly impressive behaviour, and an elegant modelling framework. One of my favourite things in the last year.

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · last mo.

Agentic coding is genuinely useful now, and there are some impressive reports of AI agents doing science. But how well and how reliably can they handle tasks scientists actually want to hand off, ones that bottleneck progress? How do we even measure that?? New paper🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2606.07718 1/10

A case study of evaluating AI agents on a neuroscience data-to-discovery pipeline

Agentic AI tools offer a promising path to automating software development bottlenecks in scientific research pipelines, particularly for stages that take domain experts days to months to build, where...

arxiv.org

NEW PAPER. Why do larger networks train better? "Because they contain more candidate *sub*networks that can learn the task" → lottery tickets This popular explanation uses an appealing but misleading metaphor🧵 We propose an intuitive alternative grounded in theory: escape dimensions

Now published - the #BANC! A full central nervous system (CNS) connectome of a limbed animal at single-synapse resolution, enabling us to follow sensory-motor arcs and understand how the CNS controls the body. rdcu.be/fncjS. #neuroscience. Video by @quorumetrix.bsky.social 1/18

Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s very fun to analyze other people’s data for your favorite model and theory, but data reuse actually takes a huge amount of effort. We tested if current agentic AI can help with data reuse. Conclusion: it definitely can, but requires careful human supervision. #AIforScience #compneuro #neuroAI

Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

New preprint with @lingqiz.bsky.social: Neurodata Without Boredom: Benchmarking Agentic AI for Data Reuse arxiv.org/abs/2605.12808 1/10

Really pleased that this work with @dudman.bsky.social is now out in Neuron: A global dopaminergic learning rate enables adaptive foraging across many options

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It was a blast to put this review together with @adriennekinman.bsky.social and Larissa! The subiculum is a gem of a brain region. Also - the manuscript process at @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social was a pleasure - thoughtful&involved feedback from reviewers&editor that really elevated our manuscript

Trends in Neurosciences@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social · 3mo ago

'The subiculum: cell-type-specific composition, computation, and function' by Adrienne Kinman @adriennekinman.bsky.social, Larissa Kraus & Mark Cembrowski @markcembrowski.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

We are hiring a Software Engineer who can help us turn our methods into easily usable tools for: * Explainable AI * Cell Tracking * Interactive Learning ...and some more: careers.humantechnopole.it/job/Research... Feel free to reach out directly if you are interested and/or have questions!

My final paper from grad school is out! Thank you to @marisosa.bsky.social @ellasay.bsky.social and my co-first author Konstantin Kaganovsky! We show that reward and novelty coding in the hippocampus requires a specific membrane fusion protein implicated in activity-dependent AMPAR mobilization!

Lisa Giocomo@lgiocomo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New paper! Congrats to @markplitt.bsky.social, Konstantin and team! The brain’s spatial map isn’t static but for hippocampus CA1 maps to change with experience, they need postsynaptic membrane fusion. A new link between synaptic machinery and flexible coding! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some of you saw a preview of this result at my Cosyne talk last week. We may have had too much fun working on this worm-fly model 🤣🤓🤣 (The digital sphinx may be imagery, but the lessons are real.)

John Tuthill@tuthill.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🧵 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...

🧵 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...

Tiny, transparent, and now charted! Our brain atlas of adult Danionella cerebrum includes >200 annotated regions, 29 whole-brain in situs, and male/female reference volumes – openly available, versioned and extendable. Work by @nkadobyansky.bsky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

Edvard I Moser@edvardmoser.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

When a fly lands on your arm, how does your nervous system decide where to swat? By reconstructing tactile axons in a Drosophila connectome, we found a leg somatotopic map and downstream circuits that sample the map to initiate targeted grooming Led by Leila Elabbady, PhD doi.org/10.64898/202...

We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment. brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

Research Technician

Research Technician position available in the Grienberger lab at Brandeis University. We are a new neuroscience group studying the cellular basis of learning and memory in the mammalian brain. This is...

brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com

After 5 years of developing, a new preprint from the lab - introducing our workflow for comparative insect connectomics, aimed at democratizing connectomics. @erc.europa.eu @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

2) Grid review. A detailed tour of the ingredients needed to get grid cells that actually look real. It boils down to: ✅ Path integration ✅ Non-linear readout ✅ Bio constraints (non-negativity and energy) Almost there on understanding grids! arxiv.org/abs/2601.12424 (2/3)

If Grid Cells are the Answer, What is the Question? A Review of Normative Grid Cell Theory

For 20 years the beautiful structure in the grid cell code has presented an attractive puzzle: what computation do these representations subserve, and why does it manifest so curiously in neurons. The...

arxiv.org

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

Compact deep neural network models of the visual cortex

Nature - Parsimonious deep neural network models can be used for prediction of visual neuron responses.

rdcu.be

🚀 New preprint from the lab! Our first foray into the subiculum uses in vivo whole-cell recordings to show that dendritic plateaus are a prominent, learning-dependent signaling mode of subicular neurons. Feedback is welcome! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is work that we presented at last year's #Cosyne workshop on #GNN s sites.google.com/bu.edu/gnnwo.... Better late than never. You can reproduce everything with the associated notebooks. I think it's a good start to learn how to use GNNs to infer something about NNs. arxiv.org/abs/2602.13325

Graph neural networks uncover structure and functions underlying the activity of simulated neural assemblies

Graph neural networks trained to predict observable dynamics can be used to decompose the temporal activity of complex heterogeneous systems into simple, interpretable representations. Here we apply t...

arxiv.org