It took 14 months, but I’m incredibly excited to share that my NIMH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) has officially been funded!

🧠🧬 What are the effects of intravenous fentanyl self-administration on the habenula and amygdala transcriptomes? In our new Addiction Biology paper, we addressed this question using a chronic long-access model in rats! Here are some highlights 🧵👇 Paper 👉 dx.doi.org/10.1111/adb....

Transcriptional Response to Chronic Long‐Access Fentanyl Self‐Administration in Rat Habenula and Amygdala

Chronic intravenous long-access fentanyl self-administration in rats produced transcriptional remodeling in the habenula and amygdala. Bulk RNA-sequencing identified 453 habenula and 3,041 amygdala d...

dx.doi.org

Very excited about this new preprint from @odrake.bsky.social, an incredibly talented MD/PhD student in the lab. 🧵 below, but the TL;DR: we found a rare striatal neuron subtype with unique transcriptional, spatial, and circuit properties that gates opioid reward.

Olivia Drake@odrake.bsky.social · 6d ago

Our new preprint from @daylab.bsky.social characterizes Chst9-MSNs, a specialized NAc population with high Oprm1 expression and opioid sensitivity that is required for fentanyl reward learning. Excited to share this work! 🧠🧬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Nice work! Congrats!

Did transposable elements shape brain evolution — and if so, which ones, and in which cell states and lineages? Led by @tyamadat.bsky.social, we explored this question in cerebellum development using sequence-based deep learning models! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today in @natneuro.nature.com, researchers led by @felsenberg.bsky.social report that memories can persist as silent traces, recoverable with the right reminder. But misleading cues can distort recall and create false memories—showing how remembering can rewrite the past. www.fmi.ch/news-events/...

Forgotten memories can leave silent traces in the brain

A forgotten memory is not always a vanished one. FMI neuroscientists investigating the fruit fly brain found that some memories become inaccessible while leaving a silent trace behind. The right remin...

fmi.ch

Full-length single-cell spatial transcriptomics reveals spatial and cell-type-specific transcript isoforms in the primate brain www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Full-length single-cell spatial transcriptomics reveals spatial and cell-type-specific transcript isoforms in the primate brain - Nature Methods

Fullscope-seq combines a spatial transcriptomics approach (Stereo-seq) with long-read sequencing. The approach provides isoform information at single-cell resolution across a large field of view, as d...

nature.com

Light-activated tetanus neurotoxin for conditional proteolysis and inducible synaptic inhibition in vivo www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Light-activated tetanus neurotoxin for conditional proteolysis and inducible synaptic inhibition in vivo - Nature Methods

LATeNT is a light-activatable form of tetanus neurotoxin that can be used for spatiotemporally precise inhibition of exocytosis in neurons and other cells. It can inhibit synaptic transmission in vivo...

nature.com

Spike inference from calcium imaging data acquired with GCaMP8 indicators www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spike inference from calcium imaging data acquired with GCaMP8 indicators - Nature Methods

In this Analysis, Rupprecht et al. investigate the behavior of GCaMP8 variants in spike inference using several different algorithms. They highlight the role of the indicators’ linearity in the infere...

nature.com

Congratulations to the 2026 @acnporg.bsky.social travel award recipients! Good to see a lot of familiar names on this list, including @mictott.bsky.social, @jtuscher.bsky.social, @kmcostalab.com, @laurenmac.bsky.social, @chanjenerational.bsky.social, and @outraajeous.bsky.social!

Incredibly honored to have been selected for an ACNP Travel Award this year! I can’t wait to share some of the new projects we’ve been working on. See y’all in January! @acnporg.bsky.social

The thalamic nucleus reuniens orchestrates prefrontal-hippocampal synchrony in memory, emotion, and disease www.frontiersin.org/journals/beh...

Frontiers | The thalamic nucleus reuniens orchestrates prefrontal-hippocampal synchrony in memory, emotion, and disease

Decades of literature point to a critical role for prefrontal-hippocampal interactions in emotion and memory. Recent studies in both rodents and humans have ...

frontiersin.org

Dual thalamic drive defines the intra-amygdala wiring complexity biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

(1/10) We’re excited to share our recently published study www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... which uncovers the spatiomolecular landscape of the human NAc, a key reward structure by integrating snRNA-seq with Visium spatial transcriptomics. 🧠 #NAcLIBD #snRNAseq #10xVisium

Spatiomolecular mapping reveals anatomical organization of heterogeneous cell types in the human nucleus accumbens

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a key component of the mesolimbic dopamine system that is implicated in several neuropsychiatric disorders. The NAc con…

sciencedirect.com

Probably one of the best pictures I’ll ever take here at Baltimore’s Sail 250 air show.

Perks of playing at the Baltimore City muni courses.

Really excited about this work with the awesome Will de Cothi & @shipleysj.bsky.social, out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We propose acetylcholine is an analogue of dopamine — tracking not reward prediction errors but state-transition prediction errors. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-026-01058-w

I am very excited to continue working with @mictott.bsky.social thinking about translational potential of directly targeting this cell population, which continually remind us in dataset after dataset of their unique vulnerability across a number of neuropsych and neurodegenerative disorders!

Really nice thread from @mictott.bsky.social about the origin of the studies and the interpretation of the findings here when the preprint was posted: bsky.app/profile/mict...

Michael Totty@mictott.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New paper out on cortistatin neurons and their role in regulating fear and cortical hyperexcitability in the prelimbic cortex! This one has been a fun ride 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to see this paper in press! I am so excited for/ proud of @aaronsalisbury.bsky.social + @mictott.bsky.social who led this project, which arose from experiments in Michael's NIMH funded F32 award, and became the basis of Aaron's PhD thesis work. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I now have multifold confirmation: mouse studies at Janelia will wind down to be replaced by studies of fish. Wow.

Even with all the new imaging tech we have, nothing beats the old school neuroanatomy drawings. I particularly love the level of detail shown here of the various nuclei and cell types found in the human amygdala. Studies of the Vertebrate Telencephalon II. Crosby and Humphrey, 1941.

19 on my K99 resubmission! Massive thanks to my mentors and letter writers for all their support. Hard to tell if it will actually translate to funding in this climate, but I'll take the win regardless!

This big fat Von Economo neuron in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the human 🧠 is here to celebrate #FluorescenceFriday with a paper acceptance in their honor 🔬👩‍🔬🧪. Congrats to @kinnaryshah.bsky.social @mictott.bsky.social @svitlanabach.bsky.social and the whole team 😀

Exciting! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Inventing the future: A neuroscience research roadmap

The past decade of transformative advances in neurotechnology portends an exciting future for neuroscience. This NeuroView charts a strategic path to accelerate and integrate research discovery and sp...

cell.com

Pain.

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

On a scale of 1 (Whatever) to 5 (I’m dying) rate your anxiety level.

UAB is recruiting neuroscience faculty at two different levels - come join our vibrant neuroscience community!

UAB Comprehensive Neuroscience Center@uabneuro.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The UAB Heersink School of Medicine is seeking to recruit up to 16 new research-intensive faculty as part of a major strategic investment in neurosciences. Faculty will be housed in a brand new research facility at the heart of campus, which is scheduled for completion this summer.

Excited to share our new paper: We uncover a locus coeruleus→amygdala circuit linking β-adrenergic signaling to transcription regulation in defined amygdala cells during memory reconsolidation—+ stress or elevated noradrenergic signaling at recall can strengthen memory. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

A neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway for reformatting aversive memories during recall

Tan et al. identify a neuromodulatory circuit-to-molecular pathway in rats that updates aversive memories when they are recalled. Noradrenaline from the locus coeruleus triggers synapse-to-nuclear tra...

cell.com