Research on songbirds offers a window into genetics & neurobiology of vocal learning. In humans, this is a key capacity in acquiring spoken language. A new paper reports a near-complete reference genome for the zebra finch, valuable for studying vocal learning & evolutionary genomics more broadly.🧬🧪

The complete genome of a songbird

A phased diploid telomere-to-telomere reference genome for the zebra finch fully resolves its complete somatic chromosome set, recovering 2,710 previously missing or unannotated genes. The assembly al...

cell.com

IN

Jonathan Pritchard@jkpritch.bsky.social · 2d ago

So, I've started a substack. I'll be writing about biology, but my first posts are about applying statistical methods to one of my hobbies: track fandom. In the first posts I describe the Pareto trade-off between a fast overall speed and finishing speed: jkpritchard.substack.com/p/greatest-1...

Over 15 years of our work consistently supports a cohesive model of neurodegeneration providing useful concepts and directions for future research: "the dependency cycle of local axon homeostasis". Enjoy the read of our completely revamped manuscript: doi.org/10.1101/2025... (PDF fixed)

Freaking finally! A massive compilation of data that sat on various desks for almost a decade is finally out. On the positive side, gave me time to learn expansion microscopy and make Fig 1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Emergent metabolic parasitism driven by organelle sequestration

Chloroplast-stealing ciliates evolve, increasing reliance on their prey for all aspects of metabolism, including photosynthesis.

science.org

What happens when evolution adds an extra pair of eyes? Male mayflies evolve an extra pair of dorsal compound eyes, the Turbanate eyes, thought to help males detect females during mating swarms. we have investigate how this remarkable evolutionary novelty develops. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Parents Parents 2026 BCE 2026 CE 🤝 "These kids and their damned tablets"

I’m tired of having to say cyclosporida or spell clyclosporiasis. Repurposing the longtime favorite “gastrocatastrophe” and adding “the old Clyclo” to the mix. Maybe “they got cyclosped” or “just a touch of the clospors” to keep things interesting.

Here's a fact that may surprise you. Until recently, nobody had managed to sequence the complete genome of a human being. Then, a landmark paper in 2022 reported end-to-end (telomere-to-telomere) coverage of all chromosomes. The new era of T2T genomics is showcased today in @cp-cell.bsky.social: 🧬🧪👇

Filling the holes in whole genomes: A vision for personalized genomics from telomere to telomere

Two decades after the Human Genome Project, we finally have the ability to read the complete genome of any human and (nearly) any species. These sequences provide the ideal foundation for training pre...

cell.com

So proud to have “Early-life stress alters H3K4me1 in VTA to prime stress sensitivity” out now in Neuron! This work spanned Many years and Many people contributed. Huge thanks to @hyejaykim.bsky.social, @ja-balouek.bsky.social, Luke Geiger, and Meaghan Creed www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Early-life stress alters H3K4me1 in VTA to prime stress sensitivity

Kim, Geiger et al. report that early-life stress increases the chromatin modification H3K4me1 and its enzymatic writer, SETD7, in the ventral tegmental area. They show that this form of epigenetic pri...

cell.com

(1/8) Our approach for untangling brain-wide interactions is out today in @cp-neuron.bsky.social! Current-Based Decomposition (CURBD) uses RNNs constrained by real neural data to reveal the input driving neurons, uncovering how brain regions talk to each other. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... 🧵👇

1/ New paper out today from my group, in @natneuro.nature.com, in which we review the anatomical & functional data on insula structure across species. This was a "whole lab" project led by @joeycharbonneau.bsky.social. It's been a 5 year in the making (a full 3 years in review)! rdcu.be/fyd7T

Comparative insights into insula structure and function

Nature Neuroscience - Charbonneau et al. compare how the insula is structured and functions in humans, monkeys and rodents, revealing similarities and differences across species that are likely to...

rdcu.be

Out today in @natneuro.nature.com is (a highly evolved version of) the second chapter of my dissertation (with @eblissmoreau.bsky.social) assessing the comparative anatomy of the insula across 🐁mice, 🐀rats, 🐒monkeys, and 🚶humans! rdcu.be/fyd7T

Comparative insights into insula structure and function

Nature Neuroscience - Charbonneau et al. compare how the insula is structured and functions in humans, monkeys and rodents, revealing similarities and differences across species that are likely to...

rdcu.be

An important paper done really carefully by great scientists (I hope that is clear!). I encourage people in the field to read it carefully and understand what it does/doesn't show, and thus what limitations on other people's work it should/shouldn't impose in peer review. For example:

Anthony Ramnauth@philoneurosci.bsky.social · 5d ago

This seems super important for in vivo experiments #Norepinephrine and #dopamine #sensor crosstalk depends on local innervation density doi.org/10.1038/s415...

"Make the training harder than the race." August 20: join me @lifescienceeditors.bsky.social, PI @barakrotblat.bsky.social, and Lior Onn-Sorek from @qedscience.bsky.social for our advice on how to catch weaknesses before reviewers do. 11 AM ET | 5 PM CEST Register: bit.ly/4gbtTKZ

Not all heroes wear--

Aidan O’Brien@aidanobrien.bsky.social · 5d ago

First, you tell me to get a hobby; now it's an “appropriate hobby”.

🚨NEW PAPER 🚨 "Deconstructing empirical fitness seascapes across scales of granularity" published in #G3 (@genetics-gsa.bsky.social) 1/2 The fitness landscape has been among the most influential instruments in evolutionary theory for nearly a century. But we often treat them as fixed and static.

Kudos to @science.org for this self-analysis of the peer review process. These kind of data are never shared and don't have to be. Wildly refreshing to see it out in the open. Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Editorial and peer review dynamics at elite general science journals

Analyses of deidentified data reveal complex interactions that quantify success at elite general science journals.

science.org

How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)

Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...

nature.com

Parenting. Not for cowards. (I'm now grandparenting. Less risk, more reward, but still not for cowards.)

Elizabeth Spiers@espiers.bsky.social · 2w ago

The now 11 year old does this all the time. When he was 5 he learned to play chess at school and got overly upset when he lost, so we had some talks about sportsmanship. Then he presented me with a mixed up Rubiks Cube and said, "since grown ups like losing so much, here's a game for you."

Deep conservation of head direction circuits in bees, ants and flies https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.26.740564v1

It's that time of year again.. No-one has demonstrated the evolutionary significance of epigenetic inheritance, at least not in animals, primarily because that is very different from just showing a transgenerational effect can occur. theconversation.com/updating-dar...

Updating Darwin: biologists are returning to an older theory to explain anomalies in evolution

To make sense of some characteristics that species exhibit from birth, you have to turn to an old discredited theory known as Lamarckism.

theconversation.com

RNA-seq tells us how much RNA is present in the cell. But to understand gene regulation, we need to easily measure the synthesis and decay rates driving this abundance. We introduce AIR-seq: analog intrinsic recoding sequencing. (1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Analog intrinsic recoding measures RNA dynamics without chemical conversion

Steady-state RNA abundance measurements mask the synthesis and decay rates that shape gene expression. Analog intrinsic recoding sequencing (AIR-seq) repurposes the base-pairing properties of N4-hydro...

biorxiv.org

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

***New preprint from the lab*** showing “Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits”. In sleep we show spiking sequences in V1 (sensory neocortex!) that represent information that has not been directly experienced www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @bndu.ox.ac.uk @ndcnoxford.bsky.social

Generative replay across hippocampal-neocortical circuits

To make flexible decisions, the brain needs to make inferences between events that were not directly experienced together. In sharp-wave ripple (SWR) events, during periods of rest and sleep, spiking ...

biorxiv.org

Applications for the NSF's NEON Ambassador Program are open, due August 7. Worth checking out if you're into open ecological data! www.neonscience.org/neon-ambassa...

Wrote about the Masculinity Scam, or how selling reactionary ideas about what makes a man helps a small number of bad people profit and makes everyone else (including men) miserable www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The racist backlash to Chris Nolan’s Odyssey is a kind of stolen valor, an attempt by the right to claim credit for achievements they had nothing to do with in order to justify racial hierarchy in the present. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Fear of Black Greeks

White people don’t own the accomplishments of ancient Greece.

theatlantic.com

Our paper is out in this week's issue of Cell! Personally, I think our cover submission by @drawimpacts.bsky.social was more exciting 😅 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Interested in SHH & Smoothened signaling or #GPCR allostery? If so, ✅ out this sneak peek of our article in press - "Receptor allostery promotes context-specific Sonic Hedgehog signaling during embryonic development" 🧪 🫀 🫁 #DevBio 👩‍🔬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neuronal circuits are assembled using a repertoire of different chemical and electrical synapses, with the latter connecting the cytoplasm between two neurons. Anne Martin asks how this complex process develops, finding proteins that bridge both synapse types. #2026SDB Preprint⤵️

Electrical synapse molecular diversity revealed by proximity-based proteomic discovery

Neuronal circuits are composed of synapses that are either chemical, where signals are transmitted via neurotransmitter release and reception, or electrical, where signals pass directly through intern...

biorxiv.org