Excited to share work with cryostat wizard @heenadivecha.bsky.social looking at gene expression in my favorite brain region (LC) in adult postmortem brain! (Long URL to spare the trouble of identifying cars, buses, beds in 5x5 pixel imgs). (1/x) link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007...

Announcing #engramsensembles '27, to be held at @tcddublin next May. Registration and abstract submission will open in autumn 2026.

Tomás Ryan@tjryan.bsky.social · last yr.

Slán go fóill - we look forward to welcoming you all back to Dublin for the 3rd installment in May 2027 #engramsandensembles

Manuscripts with women as corresponding authors are less frequently sent out for review at Science. The ones reviewed receive less favorable reviews by both male and female reviewers.

Javi Ibarrondo@jibarrondo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪

Looking for a postdoc? The @sciolinolab.bsky.social at UConn is hiring! We investigate how neuromodulatory systems interact with central taste processing regions to regulate behavior using in vivo recordings, optogenetics & mouse behavior. Apply: jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49...

Absolutely stunning work: de novo designed miniproteins targeting GPCRs as potent agonists and antagonists. This opens countless possibilities for programmable signaling, cleaner therapeutics, and faster drug discovery. Protein design is coming for pharmacology. 🚀 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Check out the birghtest star in the room: PinkyCaMP - the latest member to the red GECI family! Amazing work led by Olivia Masseck and a wonderful team! Proud to contribute

Ryan Fink@finkryan.bsky.social · 5mo ago

PinkyCaMP is finally published!! My first paper co-first authored with @sikmys.bsky.social where we make a great optogenetic and multiplex compatible red calcium indicator. Thank you to @massecklab.bsky.social and @campbell-lab.bsky.social for guiding this journey www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Officially out today! Long-running project, many thanks to give - in particular to my mentors & collaborators, the postbacs who worked so hard on each experiment, and the reviewers. If you love the amygdala, give it a read. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Risk reshapes amygdala representation of choice

Modifying behavior in response to changing environmental conditions is a crucial adaptive function. This capacity is evident when animals curtail the …

sciencedirect.com

Patrick Piantadosi@ppiantad.bsky.social · 11mo ago

for anyone interested in the amygdala and risky decision-making, check out our new preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... amygdala neurons track reward-seeking actions, and punishment risk dramatically alters this function. lots of other (BLA-accumbens!) data included.

I've been (relatively) patiently waiting for this one to come out since I saw one of these gorgeous reconstructions 🤩 WHAT AN EFFORT, and significant resource for the field! Cannot wait to dive in 🔵🧠

Jeremiah Cohen@jeremiahycohen.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.

For #FluorescenceFriday 🧠🔬🧪 - mPFC projection neurons heading to ventral tegmental area 🟢 or the locus coeruleus 🔴. Processes on some of these GPF+ neurons are just AMAZING! Image credit to our Circuits team! @jorge-miranda.bsky.social @rehg-j.bsky.social and Daniel Olivares!

Norepinephrine imaging, pushed further. Our latest NE sensors enable highly sensitive monitoring across recording modalities, Have you been using GRABNE2 sensors? the toolkit just got a major upgrade. Interested in trying them in your system? Reach out.

Too excited about this image to wait for #FluorescenceFriday 🔬🤩👩‍🔬. Serotonin neurons 🟣 in the raphe nucleus along the midline of the human brainstem 🧠, flanked bilaterally by norepinephrine neurons 🔴 in locus coeruleus. Image credit to @ishbeldelrosario.bsky.social @svitlanabach.bsky.social

Excited to share our new paper: We uncover a locus coeruleus→amygdala circuit linking β-adrenergic signaling to transcription regulation in defined amygdala cells during memory reconsolidation—+ stress or elevated noradrenergic signaling at recall can strengthen memory. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

A neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway for reformatting aversive memories during recall

Tan et al. identify a neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway in rats that updates aversive memories when they are recalled. Noradrenaline from the locus coeruleus triggers synapse-to-nuclear tra...

cell.com

Happy Monday!

Mark Baxter 🏳️‍🌈🧂@markgbaxter.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Just narrowly avoided signing off an email with "Thank you for your hell" but I should have just left it

Excited to share newly minted PhD Anu Korukonda's tour de force thesis work describing the impact of pathogenic tau on #locuscoeruleus function in a mouse model of early #Alzheimers. A must for #BlueSpot researchers! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/3

I’m thrilled to share our latest preprint from the lab, now available on BioRxiv! We investigated how early life adversity (ELA) shapes the adult brain, and the results are a stark reminder that sex isn't just a variable but leads to fundamentally different stress-induced mechanistic consequences

#JNeurosci: Johantges et al. used mice to study excitatory and inhibitory synaptic connections in the CA1 region, creating a circuit map with cell-type resolution that will guide future research on how the hippocampus supports learning and memory. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1102-25.2025

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

An engineered nanobody inhibitor for molecular-to-circuit control of opioid receptor function. This was a really fun collaboration with @miriamstoeber.bsky.social and @amanglik.bsky.social labs, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A bit late to the party, but nonetheless super happy with these news! We teamed up with a fantastic group of cancer researchers to dive into the mechanisms via which the 🧠 reward center relays anti-tumor signals. This grant not only opens up a new & exciting direction for the lab... 1/2

Open Science NL@opensciencenl.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Open Science NL is funding 27 replication studies with €5.2M. Projects will reanalyse data, repeat experiments, and explore variations across many fields. Read more 👉 www.openscience.nl/en/news/27-s...

My super talented colleagues did it again! Read @natcomms.nature.com how GABAergic VTA neurons modulate DA output & behaviour in an anorexia model. Congrats to 1st author Fabien Ducrocq, who absolutely smashed it, and to the rest of the team! 🧠 @fjmeye.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share new work from our lab showing, for the first time, a link between breathing dysregulation, stress responses, and energy metabolism via a neuropeptide receptor mechanism. This opens new ways of understanding #brainbody interactions! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Disruption of Pre-Bötzinger Complex neuropeptidergic tonality controls fear and metabolic response

Stress profoundly impacts systemic metabolism, yet the central circuits linking stress responses to peripheral metabolic regulation remain poorly defined. Here, we identify the preBötzinger complex (p...

biorxiv.org

If you have some time off these holidays have another look at our beautiful review on #LC neuropeptides 🔵🧠

ASPET Journals@aspetjournals.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Neuropeptides fine-tune the brain’s noradrenergic centre. This review maps how they regulate the locus coeruleus to shape behaviour. #PharmRev Danai Riga 🧪 https://ow.ly/SrCq50XMrCq

Very cool paper from @jangrundemann.bsky.social lab! Axon initial segment dynamics during associative fear learning | Nature Neuroscience share.google/GH5iaWUINB5w...

Axon initial segment dynamics during associative fear learning - Nature Neuroscience

Benoit, Ganea et al. show that changes in axon initial segment (AIS) length in the prefrontal cortex of mice accompany fear learning and extinction, revealing AIS plasticity as a key feature of neuron...

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Thrilled this is out, led by former PD Cameron Ogg (now with her own lab at @rhodescollege.bsky.social!). It was a driven by a desire to see, in real-time, how LC activity/NE release influences downstream targets in behaving animals. SO hard to do, but Cameron did it! www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Locus coeruleus norepinephrine neurons facilitate orbitofrontal cortex remapping and behavioral flexibility

Ogg et al. use in vivo imaging techniques to record activity in the locus coeruleus (LC) and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) during a reversal learning task in freely moving rodents. They show that man...

cell.com

Brainstem circuit for sickness-induced sleep | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Brainstem circuit for sickness-induced sleep

Brainstem circuit mediates sickness-induced NREM sleep.

science.org

Finally on Bluesky and I’m really excited to share this latest preprint with @jorge-miranda.bsky.social in which we functionally examined the role of a medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)- Locus Coeruleus (LC) circuit in regulating sustained attention. 1/7 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Top-down control of sustained attention by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)- locus coeruleus (LC) circuit during the rodent continuous performance task (rCPT)

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a pivotal role in attention by exerting top-down control to allocate cognitive resources toward behaviorally relevant stimuli based on learned context and exp...

biorxiv.org

Happy to share our study “Noradrenergic tuning of arousal is coupled to movement transitions” from my time at Michael Bruchas' lab. www.cell.com/cell-reports... Highlights: 1. Anesthetic emergence dissociates arousal components; LC-NE activation is coupled to the return of organized behavior.

Noradrenergic tuning of arousal is coupled to movement transitions

Li et al. characterize the locus coeruleus (LC)-norepinephrine system in movement-arousal coupling during anesthetic emergence and awake-movement transitions. They find that LC activity correlates wit...

cell.com

Finally dropped! fantastic collaboration with @ladenardo.bsky.social, whole-brain analyses of our novel CRH/GABA BLA-NAc projection shows impact of earlylife stress that are sex dependent & reflect reward behaviors www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... @thebalelab.bsky.social @kundakoviclab.bsky.social