Congratulations, Ariel!

I am happy you found a new home for your lab, though sad that our country failed to provide you with more support for your important science.

Perisomatic ultrastructure efficiently classifies cells in mouse cortex - Nature An analysis demonstrates that quantitative measurements of perisomatic ultrastructure features of neurons can be used to categorize them into cell types.

Leila was co-advised by Forrest Collman @alleninstitute.org.

During her PhD, she had both fly and mouse projects (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

As Leila's work shows, connectomics allows neuroscientists to apply common computational approaches to analyze circuits across scales and species.

This paper resolves questions I first worked on during my post-doc (www.cell.com/cell/fulltex....

10 years ago, I screened genetic lines and did paired recordings to find 3 cell types. Now we have a global view of how each local circuit (~300 cells) spatially parses touch signals from the leg.

New @currentbiology.bsky.social paper from Dr. Leila Elabbady on neural circuits that transform a touch stimulus into spatially targeted grooming.

Leila discovered a leg somatotopic map and used it to infer tactile receptive fields in the fly VNC connectome.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1mvu83QW8S...

Scenes from my first visit to Berlin. Hopping the fence on the way to lunch with PhD students and post-docs, playground time with @jan-ache.bsky.social, and a tour of Michael's elephant lab.

‘Digital sphinx’ raises questions about connectome models The sphinx, with a worm’s brain and a fly’s body, illustrates the potential pitfalls of using deep-learning techniques to model biological processes.

A measured story about our new pet, the digital sphinx, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social.

www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

New paper from Brandon Pratt, @chrisjdallmann.bsky.social, and colleagues on how hair plate proprioceptors sense joint limits and contribute to sensorimotor control of walking.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

fantastic lineup of fly neuroscientists

love the artwork, @somedonkey.bsky.social!

my calendar says april 6, text of the post says april 4, artwork says april 7. one way or another, looking forward to visiting Munich!

excited to have made a small contribution to this amazing work on spiny mouse skin autotomy and regeneration 🐭 stay tuned for more developments 🔬🧪

A novel fracture lattice in spiny mouse skin facilitates tissue autotomy and regeneration

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

...celebrated the Notice of Award and (Russ Vought's birthday) with a visit to the UW cherry blossoms. Every NoA is a victory these days.

Congrats to post-doc Yichen Luo (@camellyc.bsky.social) for receiving a K99 award from NIH! Yichen is investigating the neural control of respiration.

Some of you saw a preview of this result at my Cosyne talk last week. We may have had too much fun working on this worm-fly model 🤣🤓🤣

(The digital sphinx may be imagery, but the lessons are real.)

architecture may be less important than learning for artificial neural networks, but the opposite is clearly true for real ones, at least for the ones we have mapped so far.

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)

To be clear, we believe connectome-constrained virtual animals are achievable and worth pursuing. But they will require painstaking work: accurate interfaces, sufficient biological detail, and real experimental validation.

The digital sphinx is a cautionary tale, not a verdict. 🔬

END

This is a core peril of connectome-body models: behavioral fidelity ≠ biological fidelity.

Virtual animals are powerful, but ONLY if brain-body interfaces are grounded in biology. A model that walks like a fly might just be a worm in disguise. 👀

The worm connectome here isn't acting as a worm brain.

It's acting as a generic network, much as random recurrent neural networks are used in reservoir computing, here repurposed by DRL for fly walking.

Cell identities? Meaningless. Neural activity? Uninterpretable. Biology? Nowhere to be found.

Our digital sphinx shows that DRL is so powerful that it finds a solution even when the constraints are completely wrong: worm brain, fly body, zero cellular and circuit compatibility.

Give it a target behavior, it fits. It doesn't care about biology

Code: github.com/Brunton-Lab/DigitalSphinx2026

screenshot of eon systems tweet

You may have seen Eon Systems' viral "fly brain upload": a connectome-controlled virtual fly that walks, grooms, and feeds.

(if not, here is a good article about it: www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...)

It seems impressive. But how do we know the behavior is coming from the fly brain?

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social

We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked

What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective

We call it the digital sphinx

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Genome of the Abominable Snowfly uncovers the mysteries of cold tolerance in a winter active insect! New cool (literally) paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social from Marco Gallio, @matthewcapek.bsky.social, @tuthill.bsky.social, myself, and fine colleagues! ⛄ 🦟
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Trading places: What happens when neuroscience turns into machine learning, and machine learning turns into neuroscience? Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other. I asked eight experts to weigh in on what...

Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social. Will this bring us closer to understanding neural systems?

www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

I am thrilled to be able to work with @kemarshall.bsky.social (Canada), Sebastian Brauchi (Chile), and Xubiao Peng (China) to understand biophysical mechanisms of neuromuscular function in the cold.

Science transcends borders. I love that HFSP makes that a requirement for these grants. 🌍

yes, and apparently so is my next door neighbor, Horacio de la Iglesia. just walked over to wish him congratulations.

How does an animal choose between exploring for a better food source and taking advantage of a known one? Our recent work in Current Biology demonstrates how recent feeding and metabolic state dynamically influence fly local search. bit.ly/3PfrIv3 #Science #Neurosky #Foraging #Drosophila

What an interesting story, great to be a part of it with Anne and @tuthill.bsky.social , can't wait explore the adult NMJ further!

Biology never ceases to amaze! As someone who’s been studying GluR at fly larval NMJ, Anne and John’s data is truly invigorating - adult flies use way more diverse GluR codes for muscles with distinct functions. Many questions arise for other species too. Really glad to contribute to this study.

oops, sorry for not tagging you, Dion! I searched for your name but didn't find your alter ego. I suppose "Dion Synapse" should have been obvious...