I thought I was a quirky little underdog fish with cool tricks, widening the model-organism spectrum. Suddenly, headlines: "Billion Dollar Fish Takes Over" Holy Mackerel! I guess there weren't any smaller fish to fry. Anyway, I'm still the same, still making the case for model diversity.

Convergent genome streamlining accompanies independent miniaturization in the world's smallest fishes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.20.719654v1

Further cements #danionella as a robust model to study neurobiology 💪 🧪

Benjamin Judkewitz@benjulab.bsky.social · 5mo ago

How do fish localize sound without interaural cues? @johve.bsky.social et al. found a behavioral algorithm for directional hearing that predicts behavior from a pressure/motion phase comparison and accounts for how this relationship varies with distance. www.cell.com/current-biol...

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...

First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Beautiful work led by Yansong (Kevin) Lu on skeletal muscle growth in zebrafish, giant danio, Danionella cerebrum, and killifish. HCR, new image analysis tool, scRNA-seq, and CRISPR. New international collaborations between Uni Melbourne, NCVC/Osaka, Stanford & ARMI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Whole-body Single-cell Spatial transcriptomic atlas of adult Danionella ~1 cm long scRNAseq MERFISH (500-gene) HCR Endothelial cell podxl+ (Fig S8) Vascular vs Visceral mural cell (Fig S10) Peter Reddien lab bioRxiv 2026 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our latest study on the neurobiology of collective behavior is now posted as a preprint, led by UCSD PhD student Jo-Hsien Yu @anitajhyu.bsky.social @ucsandiego.bsky.social @danionella.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Out in Current Biology, by Ari Penalva and the Douglass lab: "Oxytocin-mediated social preference and socially reinforced reward learning in [☝️]": www.cell.com/current-biol... With a preview by Florian Engert: www.cell.com/current-biol...

Oxytocin-mediated social preference and socially reinforced reward learning in the miniature fish Danionella cerebrum

Penalva-Tena et al. demonstrate that Danionella cerebrum, a miniature fish that is gaining popularity as a neuroscience model, seeks out conspecifics and that the resulting social interactions can sup...

cell.com

#Danionella in the creature column www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Danionella fishes - Nature Methods

Miniature, transparent Danionella fishes, which are among the smallest living adult vertebrates, allow investigation of general principles of brain-wide neural circuits and evolutionary and developmen...

nature.com

For today's #fluorescenceFriday, a transgenic Danionella cerebrum, the world's (second) smallest vertebrate (yep, "stout infantfish" are smaller, but no one has made them glow yet!). Picci by our very own @xinwei-wang.bsky.social

New work with @danionella.bsky.social from Naumann Lab @dukemedschool.bsky.social

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

Divergent Visuomotor Strategies in Teleosts: Neural Circuit Mechanisms in Zebrafish and Danionella cerebrum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.22.624938v1

Divergent Visuomotor Strategies in Teleosts: Neural Circuit Mechanisms in Zebrafish and Danionella cerebrum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.22.624938v1

Divergent Visuomotor Strategies in Teleosts: Neural Circuit Mechanisms in Zebrafish and Danionella cerebrum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.22.624938v1

Many animals respond to sensory cues with species-specific coordinated movements to successfully nav

biorxiv.org

Switched waters to Bluesky. Still singing, still transparent, and back to having the smallest vertebrate brain around.