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

Annual reminder: if you’ve been accepted to multiple graduate programs and are still deciding, please let the ones you’re definitely not going to know as soon as possible!

-Someone who got into his PhD off the waitlist the day after the deadline

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...

Amazing work, congratulations!

This should be of interest to anyone thinking about how neuronal cell types evolve. Great work from the Ding lab 🪰🧠 Congratulations to @justin-t-walsh.bsky.social and everyone involved!

High-resolution single-cell analyses reveal evolutionary constraints and evolvability of sexual circuits in Drosophila | PNAS Understanding how the cellular and molecular composition of neural circuits evolves to generate species-specific behaviors remains a major challeng...

High-resolution single-cell analyses reveal evolutionary constraints and evolvability of sexual circuits in Drosophila | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Rewiring an olfactory circuit by altering cell-surface combinatorial code - Nature In Drosophila, changing the expression of a small set of cell-surface proteins in just one type of olfactory neuron rewires its connections almost entirely to a new postsynaptic partner neuron type, altering the fly’s odour response and courtship behaviour.

Nature research paper: Rewiring an olfactory circuit by altering cell-surface combinatorial code

go.nature.com/3MbCoZT

From neurons to novelty: Circuit mechanisms shaping courtship evolution The vast diversity of animal behaviors has long inspired ethologists and neuroscientists, but circuit mechanisms driving this variation remain elusive…

@rorycoleman.bsky.social and I wrote an opinion piece called

'From neurons to novelty: Circuit mechanisms shaping courtship evolution'

We argue that now is a great time for neuro-evo research

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on.

(Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

Estrogen modulates reward prediction errors and reinforcement learning - Nature Neuroscience Dopamine encoding of reward prediction errors naturally fluctuates over females’ reproductive cycles with estrogenic signaling due to reduced expression of dopamine reuptake proteins.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#blueprint 1/7

Congrats to everyone involved! Looking forward to some fun weekend reading

1/ Hello Drosophila-philists and braino-maniacs! 👋🪰🧠🧪

The Caron lab has a new preprint, and it is about 🥁🥁🥁 democracy!

Neuro-democracy, to be precise. So: drop EVERYTHING and listen up — a 🧶!

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

Congratulations Leah, really amazing work!

A rapidly evolving female-controlled lock-and-key mechanism determines Aedes mosquito mating success Houri-Zeevi et al. uncover a lock-and-key mating system in mosquitoes, where females control mating through genital responses to rapidly evolving male structures. Males of the invasive Asian tiger mos...

New
@currentbiology.bsky.social paper from @leslievosshall.bsky.social&@leahhouri.bsky.social: FEMALE mosquitoes control mating, not males, by special genital movement. No elongation = no mating! Plus: male asian tiger mosquitoes can bypass the yellow fever mosquito female control shorturl.at/tsIWH

The first detailed look at how mosquitoes mate from @leslievosshall.bsky.social's lab reverses the assumption that male mosquitoes control the process, finding that a subtle female behavior dictates whether mating will take place or not. @currentbiology.bsky.social

More here: https://bit.ly/4huwEpL

Huge congrats to you and everyone involved! What an impressive piece of work. Especially exciting for the courtship aficionados among us 🪰❤️

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/

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.

There is still “an urgent need for donations from the community,” says Eric Lai, president of the Fly Board.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/community/fl...

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

Ichetucknee Springs State Park, a short drive from Gainesville, FL

The Hopkins Lab (hopkins-lab.com) at the University of Florida is looking to recruit a postdoc to work on the genetics of organ function and evolution across Drosophila and beyond. Please visit tinyurl.com/vcsjpmzz or email me for more info. And please RT or send to anyone who might be interested!

ALT text: A UMAP representation of a single cell RNAseq dataset from the Drosophila ventral nerve cord as well as images of the Drosophila nerve cord connectome and different stages of fly development.

Neuronal diversity is written in transcriptional codes 🧬. But what is the logic of these codes that define cell types and wiring patterns?
To find out we built a #scRNAseq developmental atlas of the Drosophila nerve cord and linked it to the #connectome 🪰🧠
#preprint thread ⬇️1/8

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint:
“Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computational Ecology and/or Evolution @columbiauniversity.bsky.social.
Deadline to apply September 30.
Reach out if you have questions.

apply.interfolio.com/172496

Changes in cell type composition, including cell expansions, cell losses, and novel cell gains, are associated with the evolution of specific behaviors. Figure credit: Matteo Farinella.

New review on how changes in cell type composition in and outside the brain contribute to the evolution of behavior. 🧪

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lihM,LqAZ...

Evolution of Cajal-Retzius Cells in Vertebrates from an Ancient Class of Tp73+ Neurons In the developing cerebral cortex, Cajal Retzius (CR) cells are early-born neurons that orchestrate the development of mammalian-specific cortical features. However, this cell type has not been conclu...

Excited to share our latest work on brain evolution, where we dive into the evolution of Cajal-Retzius cells! If you are interested in cell type evolution and cerebral cortex evo-devo, please read on… www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/7

Thanks a lot Max, I hope we can connect in person sometime!

Thanks!

Thanks Anurag! Hope you’re doing well!

Thanks Noam! Hope your own transition is going smoothly 🌱

Preprint for my PhD. Thanks to Dr. Bai for letting me merge my interests in neuroscience with lab focus on peroxisome. We discover unexpectedly cell type specific peroxisomal import in subset of glia under autonomous circadian regulations. Gratitude to Dr. John Vaughen for his support. Thread soon.