I am excited to announce that I have opened my own lab at SMU in Dallas, Texas! We are studying questions surrounding how our environment shapes social interactions across lifespan using aggression across sexes in Drosophila as a model. (Photos are of SMU's Dallas Hall and the view from my office)

At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain

No two neurons are the same, yet models often treat neural populations as pools of identical and interchangeable elements. Here, Dahmen et al. highlight recent theoretical advances that reveal the imp...

cell.com

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.

Very proud of this new paper from the lab! Work by the magnificent Andrea Adden and many brilliant collaborators illuminate how moth and butterfly brains have evolved in light of different ecologies. Freely available here: rdcu.be/eVR3B; @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social

⚡️Mitochondria make ATP, the energy that powers life. But in neurons, with axons up to a meter long, how do these tiny power plants stay functional in the right places? We went looking. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Self-renewal of neuronal mitochondria through asymmetric division

Mitochondrial ATP production is essential for life. Mitochondrial function depends on the spatio-temporal coordination of nuclear and mitochondrial genome expression, yet how this coordination occurs ...

biorxiv.org

How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!! How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭 led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman: “Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread ⬇️

Excited to share the latest work from the lab: rdcu.be/eRWuD Great team effort, led by @enriberti.bsky.social first at @unil.bsky.social and now @unifr.bsky.social; with fantastic collaborators @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social and @dahaniel.muench.bio.

Thrilled to share our new paper! With @tomtom-auer.bsky.social team, we asked how #evolution reshapes what animals #eat to match their ecological niches. Using pan-neuronal Ca2+ imaging, we show that the changes are in how the brain processes #taste. Link @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Evolution of taste processing shifts dietary preference - Nature

Calcium imaging of taste neurons and the ventral brain provides insight into evolutionary divergence of food choice in Drosophila species, supporting a role of sensorimotor processing in addition to p...

nature.com

🚀 New paper alert! Thrilled to share our latest study led by postdoc @gera_jayati published in eLife. 👉 doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Continue reading for a summary. 🧵

Anti-diuretic hormone ITP signals via a guanylate cyclase receptor to modulate systemic homeostasis in Drosophila

A multi-pronged approach reveals that ion transport peptide neuropeptide acts through the guanylate cyclase receptor Gyc76C to coordinate osmotic and metabolic homeostasis across multiple tissues in D...

doi.org

Excited to share my most recent postdoctoral work in the Jeanne lab @yaleneuro.bsky.social ! “Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We ask: how is a sensory code transformed across multiple stages of processing to inform behavior?

Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics

Extracting relevant features of a complex sensory signal typically involves sequential processing through multiple brain regions. However, identifying the logic and mechanisms of these transformations...

biorxiv.org

Delighted to share an updated pre-print on how adaptive control in visual pursuit is implemented at the circuit level. New behavior and neuronal data in females (!) shows how two AOTU pathways are key elements in both sexes. Check it out on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Specialized parallel pathways for adaptive control of visual object pursuit

To pursue a moving visual object, the brain must generate motor commands that continuously steer the object to the center of the visual field via feedback. The gain of this control loop is flexible, y...

doi.org

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality - Nature Reviews Genetics

Kay et al. review evidence that parental care, and more complex social behaviour based on parental care, evolved in multiple species through the repeated co-option of members of a pleiotropic molecula...

shorturl.at

Do flies feel pain? Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social. 🪰⚡👻🎃 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper out in the Journal of Neuroscience! What happens when the brain’s “social reward” circuits go off track? Rats overexpressing human DISC1 show specific deficits in social reward learning, but intact nonsocial learning, … doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

Social Reward Learning Deficits and Concordant Brain Alterations in Rats Overexpressing Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1)

Social deficits are a hallmark of schizophrenia, often characterized by impairments in processing and integrating socially transmitted information. However, translational models that accurately captur...

doi.org

🪰 folks! I spoke to the Transmitter about FlyBase. As noted at flybase.org, bridge $ ran out and many staff were laid off. Good news is stopgap contributions will keep core FlyBase operations active. But community support remains essential. Please donate @FlyBase and share! 1/2 tinyurl.com/FlyBase

FlyBase secures funding for year, but future still uncertain

The FlyBase team’s fundraising efforts have proven successful in the short term, but restoration of its federal grant remains uncertain.

tinyurl.com

@senapati.bsky.social latest and greatest! Charly Treiber on board too. Over and out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Visceral signaling of post-ingestive malaise directs memory updating in Drosophila

Consolidation is a time when labile memories transition to a stable form. Malaise learning in Drosophila reveals consolidation to also permit memory updating. Flies taught to associate one of two odor...

biorxiv.org

Excited to announce our new pre-print (www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...)! This collaborative work (co-led by Adriane Otopalik and Gerry Rubin) examines how neuronal circuits regulate social behaviors, like courtship🫶 and aggression🥊, across sexes. #neuroscience #Drosophila #WomenInSTEM 🧪1/

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint We discovered that the fruit fly #drosophila erecta requires food odor to mate and arousal is further enhanced by social group motion. Cross-species analysis of brain activity reveals a novel gate evolved from within a conserved circuit shorturl.at/gGYm7

Are flies a good model to discover and investigate mechanisms of treatments for alcohol use disorder? We validated known treatments and suggest a potential new treatment: gamma secretase inhibitors.

Rebecca Oramas, PhD@rebeccaoramas.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Ever wonder how fruit flies can be used to help uncover novel therapies for #AlcoholUseDisorder? My new paper with @karlakaun.bsky.social describes a behavioral assay pipeline using #Drosophila that can be used to screen new treatments and to investigate the mechanism of currently available drugs.

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint: “Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

Out now - female fruit flies cluster their eggs together depending on their social environment 🪰🧪 Just wish they'd let us know why... led by @emilyrosech.bsky.social Emily Fowler, Lucy Friend and Tracey Chapman. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Female fruit flies use social cues to make egg-clustering decisions - BMC Biology

Background The ability to respond plastically to environmental variation is a key determinant of fitness. Females may use cues to strategically place their eggs, for example adjusting the number or lo...

link.springer.com

Our latest work reveals that arbitrium phages cross-communicate across species! These tiny viruses “listen” to signals from others, coordinating lysis-lysogeny decisions across species. Original idea from @albertomarina.bsky.social and, as usual, he was right. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Phages communicate across species to shape microbial ecosystems

Arbitrium is a communication system that helps bacteriophages decide between lysis and lysogeny via secreted peptides. In arbitrium, the AimP peptide binds its cognate AimR receptor to repress aimX ex...

biorxiv.org

Lab’s 1st preprint! Menstruation is understudied due to societal taboos + a biological challenge: mice (a key system for research + drug discovery) don’t menstruate. @cagricevrim.bsky.social made menstruating mice + used them to discover early events in menstruation. He is on the job market!

Çağrı Çevrim@cagricevrim.bsky.social · 10mo ago

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉 @karalmckinley.bsky.social We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice. We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉 @karalmckinley.bsky.social We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice. We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵

Induction of menstruation in mice reveals the regulation of menstrual shedding

During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

biorxiv.org

Having personally sworn for years that insects don’t use GPCRs for odour detection, Suguru Takagi (@sugurutakagi.bsky.social) discovers that, in fact, they sometimes do … www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A GPCR signaling pathway in insect odor detection

Odor detection differs fundamentally in vertebrates, which use G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and insects, which employ ion channels. Here, we report the first evidence for a GPCR defining tunin...

biorxiv.org

🪰 A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system—a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the millions of connections between them. 🔗 https://hhmi.news/4o3EJnk

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

Male CNS Connectome

A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

janelia.org

Insect spatial memory is thought to be based on panoramic snapshots that are modelled as retinotopic images. This idea won't allow a distinction of landmarks from the scene. Unexpectedly, our data suggest that 🐝 learn 3D-objects as individual landmarks. #neuroethology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint alert! The uterus expands ~500-fold in pregnancy, yet we know little about how pressures are sensed. Led by @yunxiao-dr.bsky.social, we show PIEZOs are required for contractions and birth in mice, with dual roles of PIEZO1 in muscle and PIEZO2 in neurons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

PIEZO channels link mechanical forces to uterine contractions in parturition

Mechanical forces are extensively involved in pregnancy and parturition, but their precise roles and mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we identify mechanically activated ion channels PIEZO1 a...

biorxiv.org