Photometry phriends preprint: excited to share @racheldonka.bsky.social's side quest to validate how multiple sensors of mesolimbic signaling respond to acute morphine treatment - with @mitchroitman.bsky.social and @basedownloh.bsky.social

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

Sensor sensibility: Divergent measurements of dopaminergic signaling to acute morphine administration via fiber photometry https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.19.733408v1

Tremendously excited to announce that I will be joining @rockefeller.edu as an Assistant Professor and Head of Lab starting in January 2027! My group will be broadly focused on theoretical neuroscience, and mathematical problems in neural computation in the large.

Really neat work by my colleagues at UIC comparing ML to traditional ephys event detection tools. Happy that @zachfyke.bsky.social and I could make a contribution!

SfN Journals@sfnjournals.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#eNeuro | Optimizing and Benchmarking Machine Learning and Traditional Synaptic Event Detection Pipelines in Neurophysiology Experiments https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0410-25.2026

Just a perfect @mblscience.bsky.social evening.

I think Zach Fyke, a graduate student in our group may have broken some sort of patch-clamp record while teaching at @mblscience.bsky.social. Over the past three days, he has coached 21 people to patch at least one cell on our rig away from home. Photos are our “wall of success.”

Sniffing Out Distance: How the Brain Tracks Odor Dynamics 🧠 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd. #Olfaction #Neuroscience www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @luxorboero.bsky.social @josephdzak.bsky.social @paulmasset.bsky.social @siddjakes.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @harvardbrainsci.bsky.social

Sniffing Out Distance: How the Brain Tracks Odor Dynamics - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology

A dog unearths a bone buried months ago. A moth flies across a forest toward an orchard. A person opens container after container in the fridge, trying to […]

mcb.harvard.edu

Our work on the perception of intermittent odor stimuli out in @natcomms.nature.com! Led by @luxorboero.bsky.social & former grad student Hao Wu; key contributions from @btolooshams.bsky.social, @siddjakes.bsky.social, @paulmasset.bsky.social, @josephdzak.bsky.social, Farhad Pashakhanloo, Demba Ba.

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

Our latest work is available at @sfnjournals.bsky.social. This project was conceived of and completed by Kai Clane Belonio, an amazing postbac student who worked with us for the past two years. We learned that stress influences olfactory experience and activates microglia in the piriform cortex.

SfN Journals@sfnjournals.bsky.social · 4mo ago

#eNeuro: People who experience depression after long-term stress are more sensitive to unpleasant smells. Belonio et al. used mice to explore the mechanism for this change in the sense of smell. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0330-25.2026

Visualizing and Sonifying NeuroData (ViSoND) github.com/Smear-Lab/Vi... is a strategy for observing multiple data streams in video and sound www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... e.g., watch an animal move while you listen to their physiological signals (or vice versa)

Smelly past, or: history with all senses ... Glad to see @theguardian.com reporting on @barahuber.bsky.social and colleagues' brilliant research in #olfactory #archaeology. 👃🏺 www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

T rex breath and Queen Elizabeth’s car: scientists creating ‘time machine for the nose’

Researchers are recreating ancient odours for museumgoers as interest in the archaeology of smell grows

theguardian.com

In case there was any doubt about what was going on behind these doors.

Balloon museum in #Chicago, absolutely fantastic instillations.

Not exactly #fluorescencefriday, but #chicago was glowing beautifully yesterday evening.

Excited to share our new preprint for this project!

Dima Rinberg@dimarinberg.bsky.social · 6mo ago

How do past sensory experiences prepare us for new ones? Our new paper tackles this long-standing question, revealing a role for activity sequences in the olfactory bulb. Excited to share our work led by @jonvgill.bsky.social with Mursel Karadas & Shy Shoham www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cool. Smell in the spider brain. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Presumed Glomerular Neuropils in the Central Nervous Systems of Spiders (Araneae)

Spiders sense chemicals in their environment with particular sensory hairs (sensilla) on their legs and feelers. Chemosensory neurons inside these sensilla send their axons into the central nervous s...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

I am thrilled to share our latest work led by @zurisullivan.bsky.social in collaboration with @moffittlab.bsky.social ! We find that the brain encodes distinct, pathogen-specific sickness states across behavior, physiology, neural activity, and gene expression 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Environmental representations in mouse hippocampal CA1 reflect the predictive structure of navigation

Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…

sciencedirect.com

First paper from the lab! We propose a model that separates estimation of odor concentration and presence and map it on olfactory bulb circuits Led by @chenjiang01.bsky.social and @mattyizhenghe.bsky.social joint work with @jzv.bsky.social and with @neurovenki.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Simultaneous detection and estimation in olfactory sensing https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.01.686013v1

Chicago is definitely burning. Just not in the way the news wants to portray.

#Wolbachia has puzzled scientists with its power to rewire insect reproduction. What if I tell you that we found one of the keys Wolbachia use to rewire its host AND a small molecule inhibitor uses this key to mimic what this microbe has mastered for millions of years. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Beyond Wolbachia—Can a small molecule control insect reproduction?

Kaur et al. demonstrate reduced histone acetylation as a key mechanism underpinning Wolbachia’s paternal-effect embryonic lethality trait in Drosophila melanogaster. Recapitulation of this trait by in...

cell.com

Very excited to see this out in the world. It was fun to play a (small) part in it.

Herbert Wu@herbertwu.bsky.social · 11mo ago

This was a truly collaborative effort and will open new avenues to probe social cognition and collective behavior. Huge thanks to the amazing team who made this cooperation😁 possible! @esschaffer.bsky.social @nuttidanuttida.bsky.social @talmo.bsky.social @nan-mssm.bsky.social (5/5)

Octopuses sense environmental microbiomes to drive predatory and parental behaviors. Artwork by Lily Soucy. #evolution #sensation #microbiome @cellpress.bsky.social

Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!

Venki Murthy@neurovenki.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies

Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

biorxiv.org

Proud to share Kai Clane Belonio’s latest work in our lab. Kai showed that induced-depression decreases behavioral tolerance of aversive odorants as well as increases in neuroinflammation in sensory affective areas. Also contributing are @nervenkidd.bsky.social and Eyerusalem Haile.

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

Neuroinflammation in Olfactory Circuits Underlies Odor Hypersensitivity in a Rodent Model of Depression https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.14.670114v1

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com! We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments www.nature.com/articles/s41... This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Some campus brutalism to accompany this brutal heatwave.

@shawn-anthony.bsky.social helped ~20 undergrads learn transcriptomics in this budget friendly investigation into the dogbane family. A fun way to investigate the molecular evolution of the group. Also, a chance to collaborate with @phylonatworks.bsky.social and Jarrad! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Going green: Recycling transcriptomes to infer evolutionary relationships, gene duplication, gene tree conflict, and patterns of molecular evolution in the Apocynaceae

Background and Aims: The flowering plant family Apocynaceae exhibits diverse adaptations with biological and pharmaceutical significance, many of which have been studied with RNA-seq. However, despite...

doi.org

Animals’ sniffing drives rhythmic input to the olfactory system. How does this timing contribute to perception, especially beyond first steps of olfactory processing? We tested this using simple closed-loop optogenetics in our new paper: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Decoding olfactory bulb output: A behavioral assessment of rate, synchrony, and respiratory phase coding

Neurogenetics; Behavioral neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience

cell.com