🎉 New/updated preprint! From 🌟 GS Kirsten Judge + Most neuronal cilia form during development. Can adult neurons rebuild damaged cilia? Are functions restored? Does regrowth use different pathways from ciliogenesis? Answers (in C. elegans): Yes, yes, and partly. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Neuron-intrinsic and glial pathways regulate sensory cilia regeneration in adult C. elegans

Primary cilia are microtubule-based organelles that mediate cellular responses to environmental cues. Although cilia disassemble and reassemble upon cell cycle entry and exit, respectively, in dividin...

biorxiv.org

1/11 Excited to share my postdoc work from @schierlab.bsky.social and Rainer Friedrich! 🐟👃 How does the brain decide whether an odor is good or bad? In larval zebrafish, we find that odor preference is reflected in spatially cohesive neuronal domains of the olfactory bulb. 🧵

Terrific opportunity to work with an amazing young PI! - bsky.app/profile/vulc...

Jeff Markowitz@vulcnethologist.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Come work with us! We're looking for a new lab manager to help us develop new motion capture methods, new biosensors, and to hopefully learn something cool about the brain. Bonus: you get to do all this in the ATL and, in my humble opinion, we're nice people to work with! markolab.org/careers/

How ancient are the building blocks of animal sensory systems? Key components of animal sensory systems evolved before animals. We find that choanoflagellates possess diverse & spatially segregated TRP channels, pointing to ancient origins of sensory specialization. doi.org/10.64898/202...

We are looking for a new lab manager to join our team! See jobs.smartrecruiters.com/HarvardUnive... or DM if interested - neuroscience background a big plus but not required

Research Lab Manager

Company Description: By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds...

jobs.smartrecruiters.com

Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

A synaptic locus of song learning - Nature

Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...

nature.com

Excited to see our paper describing a stereotyped receptor map for smell (led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social ) out in the world! See below for short thread with open access link to paper www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/s...

Scientists Unveil ‘Long Lost’ Map for Smell

nytimes.com

Can we predict what a molecule smells like from its structure? A new exchange in @ChemSenses debates this question. 🧪 @kingfunk.bsky.social

Happy to share the latest from the lab! A microbiome-generated metabolite affects male-male aggression and social dominance in mice via the main olfactory system. Gut-Nose-Behavior. www.cell.com/current-biol...

A microbiome-derived olfactory signal regulates inter-male aggression and social dominance in mice

Cichy et al. show that trimethylamine (TMA), a gut microbiome-derived metabolite, activates the receptor TAAR5 in the main olfactory system to regulate aggression and social dominance in male mice. Th...

cell.com

@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal! A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks

Weinreb et al. reveal a hierarchy of timescales in mouse behavior, including low-level syllables and high-level behavioral states. States and syllables are encoded in different brain areas. Prefrontal...

cell.com

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Warm congratulations to The Brain Prize winners 2026, Professor David Ginty and Professor Patrik Ernfors, for their pioneering work on how the nervous system detects and processes touch and pain. Karolinska Institutet HHMI #Neuroscience #BrainPrize2026

@annaryba.bsky.social's paper on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social Highly recommend! -> Paper identifies neural substrate for variation in promiscuity among Drosophila melanogaster strains🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution in Drosophila

Sexual selection acts on heritable differences within species, driving the parallel diversification of signal production in one sex and behavioral res…

sciencedirect.com

Philipp Brand@pbrand.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Exciting new Ruta lab preprint by @annaryba.bsky.social et al. on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation: Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution Drosophila www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Monitoring gene expression in the brain with a simple blood test? In collaboration with @jerzyszablowski.bsky.social & his lab we figured out how to do it nonhuman primates using noninvasive neuroengineering of synthetic serum markers. nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

I spoke with Laura Schenkman at The Transmitter about my candidacy for the House! Going from the lab to public life is a huge transition. From a lifetime of research to biotech to democracy to running for office, here’s the story of one scientist: www.thetransmitter.org/policy/is-th...

Meet the neuroscientist running for Congress

Sam Wang, a neuroscientist running for the U.S. House of Representatives, has been interested in “fixing bugs in democracy” for decades.

thetransmitter.org

One of the biggest questions in biology is how complex cells evolved about 2 billion years ago. Here's my new story on how scientists are solving the mystery of eukaryotes like us. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qMbo22

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

New preprint from our group (collaboration with @sueyeonchung.bsky.social) showing that discriminating odor components within a complex mixture is constrained by neural sensitivity rather than background interference - likely due to sparse representations at the front end.

#20Years20Stories Collection 1️⃣9️⃣ Defining moments with @megancarey.bsky.social Megan Carey’s story tells us about big dreams and big ideas that came true. 📝 Full story: www.fchampalimaud.org/news/intangi... 🔗 Collection: www.fchampalimaud.org/20-years-20-...

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

If you’re interested in ants, olfaction, gene regulation, or all of the above, here’s a new preprint from the lab for you. It describes an unorthodox mechanism of transcriptional interference by which ant olfactory sensory neurons produce a single functional receptor. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Transcriptional Interference Gates Monogenic Odorant Receptor Expression in Ants

Communication is crucial to social life, and in ants, it is mediated primarily through olfaction. Ants have more odorant receptor (OR) genes than any other group of insects, generated through tandem d...

biorxiv.org

More new science from the lab! Led by @nathancsharris.bsky.social (now at GA State) and PD Priya Dutta. We describe how experience tunes the ratios of functional receptors in a single sensory neuron via coordinating transcriptional and post-transcriptional mechanisms to drive response plasticity.

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Experience-dependent reconfiguration of receptors at a sensory compartment regulates neuronal plasticity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.13.670147v1

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

Some parts of the Drosophila olfactory circuit have evolved more than others, according to a new comparison of two fruit fly species’ connectomes. By @martajhill.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/connectome/c...

Cross-species connectome comparison shows uneven olfactory circuit evolution in flies

The findings start to reveal evolutionary changes that may have helped two species develop different olfactory preferences and adapt to their particular environments.

thetransmitter.org

Well, none of us may ever get funded again but in the meantime, here's some new science! Led by recent PhD Anjali Pandey w/ex-UG Maya Katz. Here we identify an asymmetric molecular mechanism that underlies symmetric context-dependent sensory plasticity in the AWC olfactory neuron pair in C. elegans

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · last yr.

A lateralized sensory signaling pathway mediates context-dependent olfactory plasticity in C. elegans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.25.666858v1

Ok, reinforcement learning fans: RL is great, but what do we do when there's no obvious reward from the environment? What about perfecting a golf swing or a foxtrot or a musical performance? We may have an answer. A tale of 🐦 🎶 + 🧠. 🧵1/ #bioacoustics #prattle 💬 #neuroai #compneuro

Ziyi Gong@gongziyida.bsky.social · last yr.

I am happy to share our new preprint! In this work, we proposed a theory about how zebra finches bootstrap their error signals for self-guided RL via predictive coding 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very cool new paper by @thegulab.bsky.social published in Cell, showing that arterial endothelial coupling via gap junctions determines the speed and spread of vasodilation induced by neuronal activity ! #cerebrovascular #bloodflow #endothelium

Brain endothelial gap junction coupling enables rapid vasodilation propagation during neurovascular coupling

Vasodilatory signals are rapidly communicated across long distances by endothelial-endothelial gap junctions, enabling coordinated dilation of the arterial network during neurovascular coupling.

cell.com