Very cool new work by Hugo Zeberg, Svante Pääbo & colleagues, out in @currentbiology.bsky.social revealing increased signaling of the Neanderthal growth hormone receptor and its impact when introgressed 🧪🧬💀 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Increased signaling of the Neanderthal growth hormone receptor

Neanderthals had a robust build, but the genetic basis remains unclear. Kanis et al. show that a Neanderthal growth hormone receptor variant increases cellular growth signaling and is inherited by som...

cell.com

A really cool preprint from Joanna Wysocka's lab showing that housekeeping genes use distal enhancers as dosage buffers against TF fluctuations, but only during critical cell fate transitions. Makes so much sense! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Enhancer buffering protects dosage-sensitive housekeeping genes during vulnerable developmental transitions

Housekeeping genes maintain robust expression across cell types despite dynamic transcription factor fluctuations, yet their haploinsufficiency is associated with many tissue-specific developmental di...

biorxiv.org

I am exciting to highlight our new study published today in @cp-neuron.bsky.social. This work represents over 6 years of effort by an incredibly talented postdoc, Carlos Diaz-Salazar, in collaboration with @krzischlab.bsky.social, @bhadurilab.bsky.social at UCLA and Mercedes Paredes lab at UCSF 👇 🧵

Human-specific SRGAP2 paralogs synchronize neotenic microglial maturation and synaptic development

Using a combination of microglia-specific conditional mouse knockout and knockin approaches and xenotransplantation of human iPSC-derived microglia, Diaz-Salazar et al. demonstrate that the human-spec...

cell.com

🧬 New preprint! An interpretable omnigenic neural network architecture for the human genome We introduce the Omnigenic Model (OGM), a neural network architecture for human genetics. It uses biological system structure to aggregate genetic variation for disease risk prediction.

Update: scE2G is now online at Nature Genetics! Since the preprint, we added a new benchmark on a fully held-out CRISPR dataset. scE2G continues to show state-of-the-art performance, reinforcing that it generalizes well nature.com/articles/s41588-026-02695-8 1/

Jesse Engreitz@jengreitz.bsky.social · 2y ago

Introducing scE2G: a new model to link enhancers to target genes using single-cell data. Excited that scE2G will enable building enhancer maps in hundreds of cell types in the human body! Wonderful collaboration with @randersson.bsky.social @613weilin.bsky.social @mayayayas.bsky.social Thread👇

The amazing neural precision of learning from feedback (in the songbird brain) - "3.2 ms temporal precision. Learned changes in firing rate are not observed in uncorrelated neighboring neurons" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... This is super interesting, an illustration of what brains are capable of

New work by @bhadurilab.bsky.social, out in @cp-cell.bsky.social: A Multi-modal metabolic atlas of the developing human neocortex and cortical organoids 🧪🧬🧠🧫

Metabolic atlas of early human cortex reveals glycolytic remodeling and pentose phosphate pathway control of cell fate transitions

The developing human cortex is composed of diverse cell types, but how nutrient metabolism shapes their fate has remained unclear. This study maps the metabolic landscape of the developing human corte...

cell.com

The final version of our amygdala dopamine paper is out! BLA dopamine dynamically tracks emotional salience and not value or reward prediction error. Congrats to Dr. Megan Brickner!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience - Nature Communications

The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to supp...

nature.com

New preprint from the lab! Led by PhD students @vuslatakcay.bsky.social, Lisa Spänig and Wouter-Michiel Vierdag (EMBL), we investigated the development and differentiation of cerebellar unipolar brush cell progenitors (UBCPs). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Conserved cerebellar rhombic lip compartmentalization and Eomes regulatory networks govern unipolar brush cell development

The rhombic lip (RL) gives rise to all cerebellar glutamatergic cell types, including unipolar brush cells (UBCs). Disruptions to UBC development can lead to the neurodevelopmental disorder Dandy-Walk...

biorxiv.org

Thrilled to post thread re: new single-cell lineage of mouse embryo reconstructed w/ DNA Typewriter. One animal, zygote to late organogenesis (E13.5). Tree has 1,340,794 transcriptionally profiled, annotated tips (cells), 1,142,588 dated internal nodes, rooted at zygote 1/n

What does synapse position buy a neuron? We trained a dendritic network to place its own synapses on a covariance task. It clustered correlated inputs onto shared branches, and shuffling that placement destroyed performance while every weight stayed intact. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2607.24503 🧵-->

Synaptic clustering emerges from learning and supports covariance discrimination

Functional synapse clusters (FSCs) are synapses with correlated presynaptic activity that are colocalized on the same neuronal dendritic branch. FSCs have been observed after learning in cortical and ...

arxiv.org

Full-length single-cell spatial transcriptomics reveals spatial and cell-type-specific transcript isoforms in the primate brain www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Full-length single-cell spatial transcriptomics reveals spatial and cell-type-specific transcript isoforms in the primate brain - Nature Methods

Fullscope-seq combines a spatial transcriptomics approach (Stereo-seq) with long-read sequencing. The approach provides isoform information at single-cell resolution across a large field of view, as d...

nature.com

Great piece by @ecallaway.bsky.social A “window into the minds of some of Europe’s earliest Homo sapiens” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

40,000-year-old bird carvings provide clues to how ice age humans flourished

Newly discovered figurines point to skills that might have helped shape early humans’ expansion across Europe.

nature.com

Insightful work on archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs, by @yulinzhang.bsky.social @aabiddanda.github.io @sarahaj34.bsky.social @codushlaine.bsky.social & Priya Moorjani. Key finding: Ghost ancestry persists in so called Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry deserts 🧪🧬💀

Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs

Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unad...

science.org

Interesting twist in a new paper: Introgression deserts aren't actually deserted. “Our findings suggest that ghost ancestry is often present in previously defined archaic deserts, providing additional context to putative Homo sapiens–specific selection.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs

Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unad...

science.org

New preprint from Shendure Lab on Locus-Scale aka Long-@$$ MPRAs led by the amazing Abby McGee & @carinabiar.bsky.social Most MPRAs test ~300 bp fragments next to a promoter. But real enhancers are bigger, act combinatorially and from a distance. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our manuscript on the co-option of TEs as cerebellar CREs is now officially published in @natcomms.nature.com! Huge thanks to @kaessmannlab.bsky.social @marisepp.bsky.social, and @ioansarr.bsky.social for the fantastic collaboration throughout this project! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gene regulatory innovations from transposable elements in primate cerebellum development - Nature Communications

The roles of transposable elements in primate brain development remain underexplored. Here, the authors identify transposable elements with ancestral regulatory potential that have been co-opted as ci...

nature.com

Kaessmann Lab@kaessmannlab.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Did transposable elements shape brain evolution — and if so, which ones, and in which cell states and lineages? Led by @tyamadat.bsky.social, we explored this question in cerebellum development using sequence-based deep learning models! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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.

Pyramidal cells in the cortex send a long apical dendrite to layer 1. What is its role? What happens when it's gone? ✂️ A causal spatial role for apical dendrites in the cortex Out today with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social, @carandinilab.net and @fedrossi.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A causal spatial role for apical dendrites in the cortex

Cortical pyramidal neurons project a long apical dendrite to layer 1 (L1), to receive synaptic inputs that are thought to provide contextual and possibly suppressive modulation. In visual cortex, thes...

biorxiv.org

Terrific finds, great article

40,000-year-old bird carvings provide clues to how ice age humans flourished

Newly discovered figurines point to skills that might have helped shape early humans’ expansion across Europe.

nature.com

RNA-seq tells us how much RNA is present in the cell. But to understand gene regulation, we need to easily measure the synthesis and decay rates driving this abundance. We introduce AIR-seq: analog intrinsic recoding sequencing. (1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Analog intrinsic recoding measures RNA dynamics without chemical conversion

Steady-state RNA abundance measurements mask the synthesis and decay rates that shape gene expression. Analog intrinsic recoding sequencing (AIR-seq) repurposes the base-pairing properties of N4-hydro...

biorxiv.org

New paper alert! In this paper we were interested to formally test some of the assumptions made by computational psychiatrists - assumptions about parameter recoverability, reliability and validity. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core

The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms - Volume 56

cambridge.org

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

🧠 New preprint! How does the brain build specialized, efficient representations as we grow up? We used manifold learning to track the "intrinsic dimensionality" (ID) of brain activity in ~800 participants (aged 3mo–53yrs), as they performed naturalistic tasks and rested/slept.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 2w ago

Developmental tuning of functional manifold dimensionality across the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.24.740635v1

🧠tenure-track position on #neurodev in @neuromarseille.bsky.social 👉our team at @ibdm.bsky.social is eligible to host a candidate. Do not hesitate to contact me before the end of August! neuro-marseille.org/en/blog/juni...

Junior Group leader Position – NeuroDevelopment | NeuroMarseille

Call for Expression of Interest Registration on the Odyssée website will be open from July 23 to September 7 The NeuroMarseille Institute brings together 7 neuroscience laboratories, encompassing more

neuro-marseille.org

8/8 Our findings point to a solution to the stability–flexibility problem: learning may establish a stable temporal scaffold while leaving neuronal selectivity free to adapt.

🚨 New preprint 🚨 How does the brain learn new things without rebuilding what it already knows? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Fantastic work led by @yuyanghuang.bsky.social and Leonie Mehrke, with Tobias Bernklau and @laurabusse.bsky.social #neuroskyence #neuroscience #learning #PFC 🧪🧠 🧵👇

"Replay occurs in the dorsal striatum during offline consolidation of a procedural memory in mice" - even with total hippocampal lesions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42493550/ It looks like memory replay is a general capability of the brain - not a special feature of the hippocampus!

1/ The world's songbirds sing in just 8 basic sounds. And where a bird lives decides which ones it uses. My first PhD paper is out now in @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aee6239) Here is what we found:

Excited to share our review in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with @lauriebayet.bsky.social and @mickbonner.bsky.social! We describe how implementing principles from child development can advance the mechanistic plausibility and capacities of AI models We packed A LOT into this review, here's a quick 🧵

Neuron@cp-neuron.bsky.social · 2w ago