Ach, the supplementary video for this preprint is a life-affirming glory. But how can there only be one?? 😭
(Video visualizes brain-wide projections of locus coeruleus norepinephrine neurons in the right hemisphere.)
Gonna show this in my class today!
The supply of blood to brain tissue is thought to depend on the overall neural activity in that tissue, and this dependence is thought to differ across brain regions and across brain states. However, studies supporting these views have measured neural activity as a bulk quantity and related it to blood supply following disparate events in different regions. Here we measure fluctuations in neuronal activity and blood volume across the mouse brain, and find that their relationship is consistent across brain states and brain regions but differs in two opposing brainwide neural populations. Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) revealed that whisking, a marker of arousal, is associated with brainwide fluctuations in blood volume. Simultaneous fUSI and Neuropixels recordings showed that neurons that increase activity with whisking have distinct haemodynamic response functions compared with those that decrease activity. Their summed contributions predicted blood volume across states.Brainwide Neuropixels recordings revealed that these opposing populations coexist in the entire brain. Their differing contributions to blood volume largely explain the apparent differences in blood volume fluctuations across regions. The mouse brain thus contains two neural populations with opposite relations to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply, which together account for brainwide fluctuations in blood volume.
How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states!
Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A
@uclbrainscience.bsky.social
Glia gang, this is for you!
In this video by our #ElectronMicroscopy team, shows a pyramidal neuron (PyC) surrounded by 8 glia brain cells – 5 microglia (MG) and 3 oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPC).
🧠📈 http://microns-explorer.org
A blink response in mouse visual cortex
youtu.be/-l2uk3qmGHI?...
data from @elliottabe.bsky.social @prlparker.bsky.social @crisniell.bsky.social et al
rendered with
github.com/Smear-Lab/Vi...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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...
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)
Thanks for checking it out!
Please let us know if we can help you get started. We've done next to nothing with Ca-imaging. We haven't even tried much with continuous timeseries, just a little bit with the sniff signal
Observation is how we eye-test our data, judge if our models make sense, and generate new ideas of what to quantify next. But modern datasets are too big to just... look at. By augmenting our observational toolkit, ViSoND can be a bridge between analysis and insight
(this video is at 1x speed)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
github.com/Smear-Lab/Vi...
Pre-print, code, and readme file are primarily the work of Leah Blankenship & @sterrett-sc.bsky.social
Thanks to @crisniell.bsky.social for letting us work with their gazing mouse data
The nice thing of working in Ableton is that it enables browsing of the physiology synchronized to video, with the ability to zoom in and out and play back faster or slower.
Eye-test, ear-test, explore; supplement quantitative rigor with observational insight.
(inhalations sonified here)
No MIDI experience needed!
github.com/Smear-Lab/Vi...
Our github page shows how to ViSoND
1. Convert event data (e.g., spike times) to MIDI
2. Merge MIDI with video. We describe how to do this
a. directly in VLC
b. by working with the data in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW; we use Ableton Live).
We extend this practice by mapping physiology to MIDI
Think of it the way anatomists use pseudocolor mappings to uniquely identify different neurons' processes in space (e.g., this example from www.hobertlab.org/neuropal/)
We use MIDI pitch to uniquely identify different neurons' spikes in time
Sonification is not new.
Fig 2 of Adrian and Bronk (1928a) was a diagram of the circuit connecting his phrenic nerve prep to a loudspeaker
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
Adrian so loved sonification that he pressed a gramophone record for his Nobel lecture
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medic...
So far, ViSoND has helped us:
1. Interpret a state space model of breathing rhythms (video in previous post; elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...)
2. Observe that blinking impacts V1 activity similarly to gaze shifts (this video; pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37996524/)
both videos played at 1/3 speed.
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)
🧵 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...
Enhanced multisensory integration in the olfactory bulb of the Mexican cavefish
www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...
I’m excited to share my newest work with @benhayden.bsky.social, and the work I’m most proud of to date, on characterizing semantic coding in single-neuron hippocampal activity in patients with autism during natural language comprehension!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Flies beat their wings more than 200 times per second. How do proprioceptors rapidly sense and fine tune the wingstroke?
@ellenlesser.bsky.social combined genetic tools with the connnectome to create an atlas of Drosophila wing proprioceptors. @elife.bsky.social
elifesciences.org/articles/107...
We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1).
If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!
Here is a long story in the Columbia Spectator on Richard Axel's involvement with Epstein
www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2026/03...
1/3
... and for a little glimpse of comparative data, see figure 4. These are EPG neurons (head direction cells of the central complex) across a range of species, from earwigs to bees.
Very happy to see this paper come out from Lucas Martins @d-lucas.bsky.social and Alexandre Laborde. They developed an awesome framework, built with .NET, for developing software to run demanding high-speed behavior and functional imaging experiments.
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
Sitting in a talk on the lamina cribrosa of the eye, and am kinda horrified at the potential stresses on the optic nerve as it leaves the eye and goes to brain.
Gordon, it's 10:10 a.m. on February 16th #PhillipJeffriesDay
Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
Spiking of head-direction cells in the postsubiculum during movement (top) and during the transition from non-REM to REM sleep (bottom). Cells are sorted and colour-coded according to their preferred directions.
I don't think I'll ever get bored of looking at raster plots of head-direction cells 🤩
RNA world is a leading theory of how life began in the first place.
the dynamical perspective is maybe a path to a possible concept of a potential theory of why modern organisms replicate, develop, and function ok sometimes but not so great.
Certainly cool to think about at least!
@romainbrette.bsky.social has made analogous arguments about "representations" in the brain, which I also struggle with but like to think about
www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...
www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...
