The latest preprint from the Hansel lab at UChicago. My excellent grad colleague Abby Silbaugh shows that activating a supervisory signal local to the cerebellum can, via thalamus, influence whisker stim-induced plasticity in mouse S1. A fantastic demo that the brain + its plasticity is distributed!

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

Cerebellum instructs plasticity in the mouse primary somatosensory cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.18.649578v1

This preprint suggests the cerebellum instructs neocortical plasticity via the thalamus: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Very cool if this holds, a really important finding! I've said it before and I'll say it again: plasticity in the brain is less "local" than most people think. 🧠📈 🧪

Cerebellum instructs plasticity in the mouse primary somatosensory cortex

Sensory experiences map onto distributed neural networks and may activate plasticity processes that in some brain areas are supervised by instructive signals. What remains unknown, however, is if such...

biorxiv.org

Inspired by Cajal, the Hansel lab’s new work in @eLife provides a comparative histological analysis of human and mouse Purkinje cell morphology. Following our 2023 study, we detail differences of scale and kind between the neurons of the two species 🧵⬇️ elifesciences.org/articles/105...

Non-allometric expansion and enhanced compartmentalization of Purkinje cell dendrites in the human cerebellum

A comparative study of Purkinje dendrite morphology, input arrangement, and regional subtype distribution shows human cells evade constraint by cortical thickness to be both quantitatively and qualita...

elifesciences.org

Human neurons are incredibly complex and Purkinje cells are, by far, the largest in our brain. We give a detailed characterization of their dendrite and spine morphology and distribution across cerebellar regions compared with mouse. Check it out!

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

Non-allometric expansion and enhanced compartmentalization of Purkinje cell dendrites in the human cerebellum https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.09.612113v1

For my first blue post, a blue Purkinje cell! This cell was loaded with dye during whole cell patch clamp in sliced mouse tissue, and oops, some dye spilled out on the granule cells below during the approach...