🐸 Postdoc Position (m/f/d) in Neurobiology! The project focuses on how smell shapes feeding behavior in poison frogs and is conducted in collaboration with Prof. Jennifer Stynoski (Costa Rica). 🌎🌿 . For more information and to apply, please use the link below. www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Research Associate / Postdoctoral Researcher (m/f/d) “Olfactory Control of Behavior in Amphibians”

uni-giessen.de

1/8 New preprint alert! How are signals from the heart encoded in the brain? What could be the functional implications of cardioception? We found that neurons in the posterior insular cortex are precisely tuned to heartbeats, and that this cardio-insular coupling supports emotion coding in mice.

Exciting new results from our neighbors in the @mace-lab.bsky.social! Using functional ultrasound imaging, they look at brain-wide activity patterns in response to arousing events, showing propagation from subcortical regions to the cortex, and find a surprisingly weak modulation by noradrenaline!

Emilie Macé@mace-lab.bsky.social · 5mo ago

1/8. New preprint! Using fUSi in head-fixed mice🐭, we found that arousal events trigger a brain-wide wave of activity 🌊🧠. Surprisingly, this pattern was preserved during opto manipulations of the locus coeruleus, pointing to a minor role for noradrenergic tone. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Arousal elicits a brain-wide hemodynamic wave independent of locus coeruleus noradrenergic tone https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.06.710089v1

In @elife.bsky.social: Pallium-encoded valence-specific chemosensory amplification of eye-body coordination in larval zebrafish doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Out now in @ebiomedicine.bsky.social 🚨. Hunger often affects our mood, but is this a conscious or a subconscious process? Using continuous glucose monitoring, we show that differences in mood are driven by hunger ratings, not just glucose. #neuroskyence 🩺 www.thelancet.com/journals/EBI...

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

🎉 I am very glad to share that our paper on the rapid isotropic light-sheet microscope has just been published in Nature Biotechnology @natbiotech.nature.com. 🔗 Read the full article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Isotropic, aberration-corrected light sheet microscopy for rapid high-resolution imaging of cleared tissue - Nature Biotechnology

A light-sheet microscope built from off-the-shelf components enables high-resolution clear tissue imaging.

nature.com

Massive FOMo seeing the posts of people heading to #SfN2025, all that beach...ehm.. science I’m missing 😭 If you’re there, go say hi to the brilliant Bruno Pilcher and the INSS crew, who just built my lab a custom multiphoton microscope with a spatial light modulator that is pure chef’s kiss 👨‍🍳💋✨

Bruno Pichler@brunopichler.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Independent NeuroScience Services INSS was registered as a company on 14th November 2016, which means it's our 9th birthday today! As a birthday present we've treated ourselves to an SfN exhibitor booth for the first time ever. Come and say hello at Booth #3327

New work from Baier Lab 🧠 🐟 🔗 to paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Molecular delineation of a retina-dependent photoneuroendocrine pathway in zebrafish

Many vertebrates, including fish, amphibians, and reptiles, dynamically adjust their body color to the perceived brightness of the ambient background.…

sciencedirect.com

MPI for Biological Intelligence@mpiforbi.bsky.social · 9mo ago

How does a fish know when to blend in? Scientists identified a key circuit controlling camouflage in zebrafish – from cells in the retina sensing light to nerve cells in the brain controlling the release of a hormone that pales the skin to match bright backgrounds. www.bi.mpg.de/news/2025-11...

Ohhh, that looks cool, also quite a few nice refs to the immune role of neuropeptides, including in the gut

Nature Reviews Neuroscience@natrevneuro.nature.com · 9mo ago

The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution — a Review by Jeffrey J. Colgren & Pawel Burkhardt @jeffcolgren.bsky.social @pawelburkhardt.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper with @gili-ezranevo.bsky.social & Silvia Henriques from @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social's lab out in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Appetite, driven by amino acid need 🥚🍖 reshapes olfactory receptor expression so flies 🪰 seek bacteria 🦠 and fermented cues 🥫 to restore nutritional balance ⚖️.

Champalimaud Research@champalimaudr.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🦠 Microbes for dinner, anyone? When fruit flies go short on nutrients, their brains literally change the way they smell the world, helping them sniff out the microbes they need to survive. 👉 Article: tinyurl.com/yw4rfph2 🔗 Paper: tinyurl.com/3j4avr4x @currentbiology.bsky.social

First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E @jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Recent studies have shed further light on the evolutionary origins of chemical synapses, In this Review, Colgren and Burkhardt explore how ancient proteins were...

rdcu.be

Your reminder that many of the muscles, nerves and bones you use to hear and talk with correspond to gill structures in fish. 🧪 #evolution #paleontology

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...

The most universally agreed upon property that sets emotion/affect apart from everything else is valence: approach/avoid; pleasant/unpleasant. Here they target its computation in flies, where you can really figure out the biology. We know so little about how valence is computed by brains. Exciting!

Katrin Vogt@katrinvogt.bsky.social · 10mo ago

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A multisensory, bidirectional, valence encoder guides behavioral decisions

A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory pe...

biorxiv.org

Ever wonder if there are spatial maps in the brain outside the hippocampal-entorhinal regions? In this preprint, we describe a novel spatial map in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that preserves the topological arrangements and distance between locations. However, ... www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

The orbitofrontal cortex forms a context-generalized spatial schema that preserves topology and distance

Flexible and efficient navigation requires the brain to construct maps that are both topological, preserving the relationships between locations, and schematic, enabling generalization across environm...

biorxiv.org

Want to image the adult zebrafish brain? Here's a nifty design that I made with the help of a talented master's student, Corey Steinhauser. Supporting files here! morgridge.org/research/lab...

A 3D-Printable device for non-invasive neuroimaging of adult zebrafish - Morgridge Institute for Research

Short Summary: This device is designed for use with an upright multiphoton microscope for neuroimaging of the adult and juvenile zebrafish. It allows for fast and reproducible mounting of fish

morgridge.org

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Non-invasive longitudinal imaging reveals aging-associated changes in neuroimmune cells in adult zebrafish https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.23.676912v1

Check out this exciting study led by Anh-Tuan Trinh from our lab, where we investigated how thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish pallium receive, represent, and integrate sensory information: 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Hierarchical processing of sensory information across topographically organized thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish brain

Thalamocortical projections contribute to the spatial organization and functional hierarchies of the mammalian cortex. Primary sensory cortices receive topographically segregated information from firs...

doi.org

We currently have open positions for PhD and Postdocs! Interested in learning fUS: please apply! brainwidenetworks.uni-goettingen.de/open-positio...

Exciting new results now published in Science: responses to visual objects are boosted in the brain's spatial navigation system. Read more in the thread below! Congratulations to all the authors!!

Emilie Macé@mace-lab.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Thrilled to share that our work is now published in Science! ✨ We found a preference for visual objects in the mouse spatial navigation system where they dynamically refine head-direction coding. In short, objects boost our inner compass! 🧭 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/

Physik studieren? Oder ein anderes Fach? In Göttingen geht jetzt beides, mit dem "Bachelor Interdisziplinär", der Physik mit spannenden Disziplinen Eurer Wahl, wie z.B. Künstlicher Intelligenz, Philosophie, Neurowissenschaften, ... kombiniert. www.uni-goettingen.de/de/studium/6...

A. James Hudpseth, who died 16 August at age 79, devoted his 50-year career to untangling how the ear converts sound into electrical signals. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/hearing/reme...

Remembering A. James Hudspeth, hair cell explorer

Hudspeth, who died 16 August at age 79, devoted his 50-year career to untangling how the ear converts sound into electrical signals.

thetransmitter.org

🚨🚨🚨 Tol2kit announcement! We have rebuilt the wiki that was corrupted a few months ago! We’re in the process of also linking it to the original address. Please visit us here: tol2kitkwan.genetics.utah.edu Thank you for your patience!! #zebrafish #transgenesis #plasmids #sharing

New preprint on common algorithms and evolutionary inventions that may account for apparent idiosyncratic encoding of odor concentration across species millions of years apart by taking advantage of divisive normalization: steered by Yang Shen, @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social and Saket Navlakha. 1/3

An evolutionarily conserved scheme for reformatting odor concentration in early olfactory circuits

Understanding how stimuli from the sensory periphery are progressively reformatted to yield useful representations is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. In olfaction, assessing odor concentration is key for many behaviors, such as tracking and navigation. Initially, as odor concentration increases, the average response of first-order sensory neurons also increases. However, the average response of second-order neurons remains flat with increasing concentration – a transformation that is believed to help with concentration-invariant odor identification, but that seemingly discards concentration information before it could be sent to higher brain regions. By combining neural data analyses from diverse species with computational modeling, we propose strategies by which second-order neurons preserve concentration information, despite flat mean responses at the population level. We find that individual second-order neurons have diverse concentration response curves that are unique to each odorant — some neurons respond more with higher concentration and others respond less — and together this diversity generates distinct combinatorial representations for different concentrations. We show that this encoding scheme can be recapitulated using a circuit computation, called divisive normalization, and we derive sufficient conditions for this diversity to emerge. We then discuss two mechanisms (spike rate vs. timing based) by which higher order brain regions may decode odor concentration from the reformatted representations. Since vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems likely evolved independently, our findings suggest that evolution converged on similar algorithmic solutions despite stark differences in neural circuit architectures. Finally, in land vertebrates a parallel olfactory pathway has evolved whose second-order neurons do not exhibit such diverse response curves; rather neurons in this pathway represent concentration information in a more monotonic fashion on average, potentially allowing for easier odor localization and identification at the expense of increased energy use. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

doi.org

🔗 to original research: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Methylene blue at recommended concentrations alters metabolism in early zebrafish development - Communications Biology

Methylene Blue is an antifungal additive widely used in zebrafish embryo medium. At recommended concentrations, it exerts acute metabolic effects. This represents a previously unappreciated confound i...

nature.com

@mennigenlab.bsky.social · last yr.

Recent work from our lab: Niepukolie Nipu shows that methylene blue, at recommended concentrations used in embryo medium, affects metabolism and behaviour in larvae. These findings point to an overlooked confound relevant to larval zebrafish use in (eco)toxicity testing and the zebrafish community.

⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!) Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench 🧠🧪

ZAPBench

ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

google-research.github.io

New paper! We studied how inhibitory circuits shape the processing of olfactory information using a tight interplay between modeling and experiments. Collaboration between @fmiscience.bsky.social and @frankfishlab.bsky.social . doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Exciting opportunity! Strongly encourage to apply.

Oliver Barnstedt@obarnstedt.bsky.social · 2y ago

Have you ever wondered how memories are processed downstream of the #hippocampus and how this is affected by #Alzheimer's? We believe we may find some answers by riding all the way down the fornix to the mammillary body. Apply here for a fully-funded #PhD with us: ovgu.b-ite.careers/56yvk