How heterogeneity shapes dynamics and computation in the brain No two neurons are the same, yet models often treat neural populations as pools of identical and interchangeable elements. Here, Dahmen et al. highlight recent theoretical advances that reveal the imp...

At the Bernstein Conference 2024, Jeremie Lefebvre and I organized a workshop on the computational consequences of neural heterogeneity. Now, slightly more than a year later, we funneled the emerging discussions into a perspective piece: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

Very proud of this new paper from the lab! Work by the magnificent Andrea Adden and many brilliant collaborators illuminate how moth and butterfly brains have evolved in light of different ecologies. Freely available here: rdcu.be/eVR3B; @lundvision.bsky.social @biologylu.bsky.social

Self-renewal of neuronal mitochondria through asymmetric division Mitochondrial ATP production is essential for life. Mitochondrial function depends on the spatio-temporal coordination of nuclear and mitochondrial genome expression, yet how this coordination occurs ...

⚡️Mitochondria make ATP, the energy that powers life. But in neurons, with axons up to a meter long, how do these tiny power plants stay functional in the right places? We went looking. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Landing and takeoff sensorimotor pathways illustrated alongside fly drawings showing behavioral responses.

How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...

Schematic of how ER-EPG plasticity enables the bump of activity in EPGs to accurately track visual cues. As a fly makes a counter-clockwise turn (top to bottom) it will view visual cues (e.g. the sun) from a new angle and the EPG activity bump (red) will swing clockwise around the network by integrating self motion signals with these visual inputs. When the fly faces a different angle, distinct visual ER neurons are active. Plasticity forms a trough of weak synapses (large circles - strong synapses, small circles - weak synapses) that allow ER neurons with distinct visual tuning to move the EPG bump via disinhibition.

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!!
How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭
led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman:
“Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thread ⬇️

Excited to share the latest work from the lab:
rdcu.be/eRWuD

Great team effort, led by @enriberti.bsky.social first at @unil.bsky.social and now @unifr.bsky.social; with fantastic collaborators @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social and @dahaniel.muench.bio.

Evolution of taste processing shifts dietary preference - Nature Calcium imaging of taste neurons and the ventral brain provides insight into evolutionary divergence of food choice in Drosophila species, supporting a role of sensorimotor processing in addition to p...

Thrilled to share our new paper!
With @tomtom-auer.bsky.social team, we asked how #evolution reshapes what animals #eat to match their ecological niches. Using pan-neuronal Ca2+ imaging, we show that the changes are in how the brain processes #taste.
Link @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Anti-diuretic hormone ITP signals via a guanylate cyclase receptor to modulate systemic homeostasis in Drosophila A multi-pronged approach reveals that ion transport peptide neuropeptide acts through the guanylate cyclase receptor Gyc76C to coordinate osmotic and metabolic homeostasis across multiple tissues in D...

🚀 New paper alert!
Thrilled to share our latest study led by postdoc
@gera_jayati
published in eLife.

👉 doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Continue reading for a summary. 🧵

Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics Extracting relevant features of a complex sensory signal typically involves sequential processing through multiple brain regions. However, identifying the logic and mechanisms of these transformations...

Excited to share my most recent postdoctoral work in the Jeanne lab @yaleneuro.bsky.social !

“Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We ask: how is a sensory code transformed across multiple stages of processing to inform behavior?

Specialized parallel pathways for adaptive control of visual object pursuit To pursue a moving visual object, the brain must generate motor commands that continuously steer the object to the center of the visual field via feedback. The gain of this control loop is flexible, y...

Delighted to share an updated pre-print on how adaptive control in visual pursuit is implemented at the circuit level. New behavior and neuronal data in females (!) shows how two AOTU pathways are key elements in both sexes.

Check it out on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social :
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality - Nature Reviews Genetics Kay et al. review evidence that parental care, and more complex social behaviour based on parental care, evolved in multiple species through the repeated co-option of members of a pleiotropic molecula...

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

Do flies feel pain?

Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social.

🪰⚡👻🎃

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Social Reward Learning Deficits and Concordant Brain Alterations in Rats Overexpressing Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) Social deficits are a hallmark of schizophrenia, often characterized by impairments in processing and integrating socially transmitted information. However, translational models that accurately captur...

New paper out in the Journal of Neuroscience! What happens when the brain’s “social reward” circuits go off track? Rats overexpressing human DISC1 show specific deficits in social reward learning, but intact nonsocial learning, …
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

FlyBase secures funding for year, but future still uncertain The FlyBase team’s fundraising efforts have proven successful in the short term, but restoration of its federal grant remains uncertain.

🪰 folks! I spoke to the Transmitter about FlyBase. As noted at flybase.org, bridge $ ran out and many staff were laid off.

Good news is stopgap contributions will keep core FlyBase operations active. But community support remains essential. Please donate @FlyBase and share! 1/2

tinyurl.com/FlyBase

Visceral signaling of post-ingestive malaise directs memory updating in Drosophila Consolidation is a time when labile memories transition to a stable form. Malaise learning in Drosophila reveals consolidation to also permit memory updating. Flies taught to associate one of two odor...

@senapati.bsky.social latest and greatest! Charly Treiber on board too. Over and out.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks so much! Also any comments and feedback would be wonderful and much appreciated - feel free to reach out!

the broader Drosophila and neuroscience fields for all of the amazing previous work that allowed this to be possible!

To search across the wonderful new #malecns on your own, check out male-cns.janelia.org

Major thanks goes to our co-authors, Claire Managan, Marisa Dreher, Elizabeth Kim, Scott Miller, Katie Boone, Alice Robie, Adam Taylor, and @kristinmbranson.bsky.social, the #malecns team, as well as our amazing colleagues @hhmijanelia.bsky.social (in other labs and teams) for their support and… 10/

Across species, behavioral variability is often observed across sexes. These findings and genetic tools provide an unprecedented and experimentally tractable venue for investigating this remarkable axis of variation. 9/

that P1/pC1x and aIPg cell types play a wide-spread role in co-regulating numerous sensorimotor pathways implicated in male social behaviors. 8/

A diagram showing circuits regulating the flow of visual information in females and males, respectively.

In females, we described three circuit mechanisms by which aIPg neurons co-regulate visual pathways, causing the fly to attend to nearby conspecifics.

We were surprised to discover in males that both aIPg and P1/pC1x neurons act in all three mechanisms (as opposed to one in females), and... 7/

Confocal images of the expression patterns in the adult male central brain of some individual split-GAL4 lines that express in P1/pC1x cell types

We also generated 32 new split-GAL4 driver lines targeting single or subsets of P1/pC1x cell types. Optogenetic activation experiments revealed that some drive male courtship song and others regulate male-male interactions – a previously undescribed division of behavioral control! 6/

Examples of strong sensory (i.e. visual and gustatory) inputs to individual P1 cell types.

2) revealed surprising heterogeneity in sensory inputs and premotor outputs across P1/pC1x cell types, suggesting that sensory information is not propagated across the P1/pC1x population, but remains in separate, parallel streams (selected sensory inputs highlighted below). 5/

Summary diagram of the dense connections between the P1/pC1x, mAL and aSP-a cell type groups.

Leveraging the male CNS connectome, we:

1) found that P1/pC1x neurons disproportionately connect to other sexually-dimorphic cell types known to regulate social behavior, mAL and aSP-a neurons, forming a dense network. 4/

Images showing cross-sections of dorsal DM4 hemilineage in the male and female EM, morphologies of all male P1 or pC1x neurons together, or morphologies of individual P1/pC1x neurons in the malecns dataset

#malecns (collaborative effort with @janelia-flyem.bsky.social @camzoology.bsky.social @mrclmb.bsky.social @jefferis.bsky.social @stuartberg.bsky.social @beckett14.bsky.social @mmcosta.bsky.social Philipp Schlegel and others) split P1/pC1x into 48 cell types based on morphology and connectivity. 3/

Elegant experiments conducted across multiple labs have identified P1/pC1x neurons in males as central integrators of sensory information and regulators of social behaviors.

Yet, how the distinct cell types within the P1/pC1x population contribute to different behaviors was unknown. 2/

Excited to announce our new pre-print (www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...)!

This collaborative work (co-led by Adriane Otopalik and Gerry Rubin) examines how neuronal circuits regulate social behaviors, like courtship🫶 and aggression🥊, across sexes. #neuroscience #Drosophila #WomenInSTEM 🧪1/

a group of Drosophila erecta fruit flies on a small food patch. flies on white background

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint

We discovered that the fruit fly #drosophila erecta requires food odor to mate and arousal is further enhanced by social group motion.

Cross-species analysis of brain activity reveals a novel gate evolved from within a conserved circuit

shorturl.at/gGYm7

Are flies a good model to discover and investigate mechanisms of treatments for alcohol use disorder? We validated known treatments and suggest a potential new treatment: gamma secretase inhibitors.