you've got my vote, Ted! ✅

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥✌🏼

Congrats, Matt and team! 🔥 🍾

Stoked that @bakspace.bsky.social and I could collab w yall 👇🏼

Activity capture + chemogenetic reactivation of a placebo analgesia ensemble in the vlPAG is sufficient to drive pain relief on demand … via input from mPFC and outputs to RVM !

💊 🧠 ⚡️

New research out in @currentbiology.bsky.social finds that heart rate & sleep history encode ultradian REM sleep timing ft. L. Hao, J. Woolley, Z. Yin, X. Jin, J. Stucynski, R. Adaia, @flybottleescape.bsky.social, S. Chung & F. Weber (Neuroscience) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

woman smiling and pointing to a research poster, surrounded by two listeners

Had such a great time presenting my PhD research at this year’s US Association for the Study of Pain conference in Philadelphia. @usasp.bsky.social #neuroskyence #painresearch

luckily theres like 10 more pain meetings for some reason this year to catch up at !

Research Highlight: Targeting the affective dimension of pain www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Good

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy just published a revised entry on Animal Consciousness! By Michael Trestman, Jonathan Birch, Colin Allen @wileyprof.bsky.social @birchlse.bsky.social plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons...

!!!!! TENURE !!!!!

i am always shocked at the number of papers without verification of fiber placement or check if their AAV expressed etc ... and when i am a reviewer and ask for it then sometimes i have gotten wildly "offended" resposnes from authors

actually, someone in lab sent me this: AAVretro inject into ~ Cg2 ... those look like labeled anterior insula in this iamge ... but we do not see posterior insula

After a gentle touch to a mouse’s injured paw, a brain region involved in the emotional side of pain lights up, as seen in this mouse brain cross-section. The blue and pink signals mark genes that switch on when neurons become active. This allowed the researchers to map a pain-responsive hotspot and then target a specific opioid-related circuit. Image credit: Gregory Corder, Corinna Oswell, and Nora McCall

By splitting #pain into its component parts, researchers provide pain relief in #mice. In PNAS Journal Club: https://ow.ly/eHT750Y1eGh

#ChronicPain #opioid #MachineLearning #AnteriorCingulateCortex

!!! Same… also the histology in this part’s gig 1 just looks like bleed thru?

thank you! we didnt try the combo therapy+morphine .... could be intersting to look at something like cross-tolerance, or is there something else you think we should try out

✌🏼🤠🙏🏼😁🤘🏽

🔥🍾🙌🏼😎🎉

🙏🏼😎🙌🏼🤠🤘🏽

🙏🏼😎🙌🏼🤠🤘🏽

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Please check out the Peer Review file to see how our publication process unfolded

... as well as the Supplementary Information file for expanded Discussion Notes 1-7
👇
nature.com/articles/s41...

Brought to you by the 6+ years of dedication from these amazing scientists ...

Huge congrats to the co-First authors:
Corinna Oswell, Sophie Rogers, Justin James

... and co-Senior authors:
Eric Yttri, Karl Deisseroth, Ben Reiner

15/ 🚀 LUPE + AMPS + ACC pLick neurons + mMORp = blueprint for decoding and treating affective pain

Spontaneous behavior is the readout

Cortex is the control panel

And we just built a new switch

nature.com/articles/s41...

#Neuroscience #Pain #DeepLearning #GeneTherapy

14/ 💥 Key insight: Spontaneous pain isn’t random—it’s structured, stateful, and encoded in affective brain circuits

The ACC selects actions to reduce pain unpleasantness

And now, we can decode those states, track their dynamics, and intervene in real time

13/ 🧠📷 Activating this therapy silenced pain-related ACC activity and reduced LUPE-AMPS pain behaviors—just like morphine

But there was no reinforcment (less risk of addiction)

A new, non-opioid way to control cortical pain dynamics

12/ 🧬 Could we mimic morphine’s effects—but without opioids?

We engineered a synthetic MOR promoter (mMORp) that drives chemogenetic inhibition only in opioid-sensitive, pain-encoding ACC neurons

A targeted, biologically informed strategy for precision pain managment

11/ ⏱️ In chronic pain, yes, mice show spontaneous licking behavior (no need to do CPP) pLick neurons became less selective and less responsive

Morphine rescued this—restoring lick-locked activity and state decoding

The better the neural rescue, the lower the pain scores

10/ 📉 Morphine didn’t just reduce behavior—it silenced specific ACC neurons active during pain states

We discovered “pLick neurons” whose activity predicts licking probability

Morphine suppressed pLick neurons in a state- and behavior-dependent manner