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.

A great privilege of science is working with remarkable people. A nice piece highlighting @mindyisminsu.bsky.social. Her grit, esp through the pandemic, was foundational to the #BANC project. hms.harvard.edu/news/making-...

Making Connections, in the Brain and in Science

PhD student Minsu Kim gained confidence, experience in the lab of neurobiologist Wei-Chung Allen Lee

hms.harvard.edu

Move on from disembodied brains hms.harvard.edu/news/researc...

Researchers Publish First Complete Connectome of Fruit Fly Brain and ‘Spinal Cord’

Open-source resource poised to propel research on how nervous systems work

hms.harvard.edu

The Drugowitsch lab, in particular @zakiajabi.bsky.social, contributed an efficiently computable “influence score”—a scalable way to quantify effective distance and signal propagation in large neural networks. Code at doi.org/10.5281/zeno....

It is nice in such times to see there is so much 🧪#neuroskyence still to be discovered.

Alexander Shakeel Bates@asbates.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our thread on the newly published brain and nerve cord #BANC #connectome, and what #neuroscience stories we can tell with it.

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

Our new paper showcasing molecular connectomics with pan-expansion microscopy is out in @natbiotech.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... This wonderful collaboration with @bewersdorflab.bsky.social was led by Ons M'Saad (now founder/CEO of Panluminate) and @allisonphysics.bsky.social. (1/5)

Happy to share the first paper from my journey at @psich.bsky.social towards X-ray connectomics, now out in @natmethods.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Meet Wangchu and connectomics in the spinal cord this afternoon at LBP077.04 / LBP036 #SFN25

Wei-Chung Allen Lee@darbly.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Stop by Wangchu's poster Tuesday (11/18) afternoon to learn about circuit motifs supporting touch processing in the spinal cord.

Stop by Wangchu's poster Tuesday (11/18) afternoon to learn about circuit motifs supporting touch processing in the spinal cord.

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

It was a good experience to step back and briefly take stock of the amazing progress in connectomics since I started working on this stuff (20 years ago!) thanks as well to @natrevneuro.nature.com for the constructive editorial interactions.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience@natrevneuro.nature.com · 12mo ago

Synaptic connectomics: status and prospects — a Comment article by Davi D. Bock @dddavi.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

X-ray nanotomography can be your new friend for neuronal imaging. In our new #preprint (tinyurl.com/nanoXneuro) we present advances that push the spatial resolution limit for X-ray holographic nanotomography (XNH). We can now resolve synapses. 🧵

My PhD project is out as a preprint! We combined 2P and synchrotron X-ray to understand mouse olfactory bulb circuits, linking physiology to structure in 3 animals! doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🙌 @carlesbosch.bsky.social, @apacureanu.bsky.social, @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social, @esrf.fr, @crick.ac.uk

Couldn't agree more. There’s still so much to be uncovered in the dataset. One thing that wasn’t emphasized before is how it enables access to specific circuit motifs down to identified cells. 12 examples are highlighted in the preprint, but again just the tip of the iceberg.

@rachelirenewilson.bsky.social · last yr.

There is so much to learn from this dataset that it's overwhelming. It feels amazing to connect everything, from the "cognitive" regions of the brain all the way down to muscles, internal organs, and endocrine systems. With the analyses in our preprint, we've only just scratched the surface.

How is the nervous system organized to coordinate behavior? To approach this massive question, a team led by @asbates.bsky.social, @jasper-tms.bsky.social, @mindyisminsu.bsky.social, & Helen Yang present the BANC: a Brain and Nerve Cord connectome. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🧪#Neuroskyence

Alexander Shakeel Bates@asbates.bsky.social · last yr.

Public access to the first fly connectome that spans the whole CNS - BANC!: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc Different from prior connectomes - it is brain + cord (think spinal cord) We use it to ‘embody’ the system and find it resembles ‘subsumption architecture’ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With @megyounger.bsky.social's lab, et al., we present the first connectomics work in the disease-vector mosquito Aedes aegypti, revealing how its brain is wired to detect host cues. Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... #Neuroscience #Connectomics #vEM #VectorBiology 🧪

Meg Younger@megyounger.bsky.social · last yr.

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look: doi.org/10.1101/2025... We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

(1/30) New preprint! "Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits" with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Symmetries and Continuous Attractors in Disordered Neural Circuits

A major challenge in neuroscience is reconciling idealized theoretical models with complex, heterogeneous experimental data. We address this challenge through the lens of continuous-attractor networks...

biorxiv.org

Thanks Albert, @jefferis.bsky.social, & Joergen for a wonderful visit. Future of connectomics is bright at the @mrclmb.bsky.social.

Begets equity abcnews.go.com/US/massachus...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology to waive tuition for families making less than $200K

MIT tuition was $57,986 for the 2022-2023 school year, which is higher than the average for four-year private institutions in the U.S.

abcnews.go.com

Let’s go!!

Excited about our minisymposium at @SfNtweets! Join us Wednesday afternoon to hear about the functional organization of lateral septum - from molecules to circuits and computations! Session details here: abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/20433... #sfn2024 #neuroscience

Amazed seeing @bdsc.bsky.social in person the other week. Remarkably, they maintain >100,000 fly lines - with geo-redundancy - and provide them to users around the world! A vital scientific resource.

Come see two of our lab projects tomorrow morning at SfN. Fabricio will present behavior, closed loop opto, and EMG in a really cool mouse jumping behavior: E32 Praising (Jerry) will present Neuropixel recordings from the spinal cords of awake behaving mice performing simple reflexes: G12

UCSF Francisco researcher Corey Harwell talks about his own biography first Louisville. He is showing data about the town, maps of ethnicities. 🧠🧪 Took part in MARC program at Tennessee State = Maximizing Access to Research Careers. Also: summer research program stints.

Our fly brain connectome papers are now live (www.nature.com/immersive/d4...), and is getting traction (www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...). With ~139k neurons, >8k cell types, synapses annotated, transmitters predicted, ~134 evo-devo units denoted, so much is now possible in the fly.

The fly now has a full #connectome, in its most basic form a directed + weighted graph. But what are its connection ‘signs’, excitatory/inhibitory/modulatory? Our new, now published work moves towards this answer, predicting #neurotransmitters from EM! 1/n www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...