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...
🥳
Final version of record here: elifesciences.org/articles/107... Enjoy tracking
🧵 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...
How do development and genetics shape evidence integration? 🧠 In our new preprint, we dissect how sensory evidence accumulation over time guides decisions.
Want to know more? Keep reading or or come to Roberto's poster 1-003 this Thursday at #Cosyne2026. (1/4)
Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...
Check out this amazing piece of work by my friend Dario!
Go Katja!!! 🥳
Another memorable Bahl Lab Winter Retreat made even better by having the Vogt and Bollmann labs join us for two days of sun, snow & science! 🌞❄️
Congrats! Great work!
Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social!
A dive into the deep history of vertebrate vision, together with @mikebok.bsky.social, @neurofishh.bsky.social and @denilsson.bsky.social
Photo credit : Vasilis Karkalas
Does every visual experience shape the brain in the same way, or does what we see change how visual areas are wired?
🧠 New research from Leopoldo Petreanu’s Cortical Circuits Lab at the @champalimaudf.bsky.social, first co-authors Radhika Rajan and Rodrigo Dias, shows that visual experience matters.
Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.
@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social
1/14
New paper out : "Synchronization of behavioral and cardiac dynamics in larval zebrafish"
Here, we report a pretty striking relationship between behavioral state and heart rate in larval zebrafish, and then explore the mechanisms that lead to this coupling
bit.ly/4ciYt3R
Have you ever wondered how the brain should represent the sensory world in order to generate behavior? Read our new preprint: work by Shuhong Huang shuhonghuang.bsky.social with our long-standing collaborator James Fitzgerald at Northwestern.
Dear Friends of the MBL, I am reaching out with news about the Marine Biological Laboratory's relationship with the University of Chicago. Today, MBL and the University of Chicago announced that, following a 12-year affiliation, MBL will once again be a fully independent organization, effective June 30, 2026. MBL will continue to collaborate closely with the University of Chicago across education, research and graduate training, with the University of Chicago remaining one of MBL's valued academic partners. The University has made extraordinary programmatic, leadership, and financial contributions to the MBL. University leaders, including presidents and provosts, served as active members of the Board of Trustees. We are grateful for this support and look forward to continued academic collaboration. This partnership has fueled significant research collaborations and publications, as well as joint programs established around common research themes. Examples of these include the MBL/University of Chicago Graduate Research Fellowship Program and scientific collaborations that resulted in the development of innovative instruments, enabling high-resolution, three-dimensional visualization of cells and tissues. The outlook for an independent MBL is bright. For example, our efforts in recent years have significantly raised the ambitions of MBL's fundraising. In August of 2025, the Marine Biological Laboratory received an unrestricted gift of $25 million from MBL alumnus Mark Terasaki, the largest private contribution in our 137-year history. Additional substantial funding has been received for graduate training, named positions, facilities, courses, faculty hires, scholarships, and lectureships. Together, these extraordinary investments reflect our donors' confidence in MBL's mission and future and strengthen our financial foundation as we move forward. They build on a commitment MBL made in 2023 to achieve financial self-sufficiency, supported by the expansion of our Bo…
MBL's existing academic programs and collaborations with the University of Chicago are expected to continue as before, including research collaborations, participation by University of Chicago undergraduate and graduate students, and University of Chicago-affiliated courses and programs. The academic links that we have built over the last 12 years will serve both institutions well in the future. There are no significant changes to MBL's budget, staffing levels or operations and MBL will retain full ownership of its endowment. University of Chicago representatives will step down from the MBL Board of Trustees in June 2026, which will otherwise remain the same. I am deeply grateful for your continued engagement and belief in MBL. Your support and connection to this institution make this next chapter possible, and I look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead as we continue our work together. With appreciation, Nipam H. Patel, Director Marine Biological Laboratory
Interesting news: The Marine Biological Labs at Woods Hole (MBL) is once again becoming an independent institution. University of Chicago will remain a partner, but only one of many. MBL is an amazing place for science and science training and I hope it will thrive in this new status.
Excited to share my first PhD preprint! w/ Sören Kannegieser and @anna-stoeckl.bsky.social @insect-vision.bsky.social
We investigated how hawkmoths coordinate lateralized sensory and motor control for appendage guidance, revealing similar control principles to vertebrates doi.org/10.64898/202...
The first paper from the lab is now out in Science Advances: Multimodal social context modulates larval behavior in Drosophila
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
We find that fly larvae keep their distance to conspecifics in the absence of food, enjoy reading! @cbehav.bsky.social @uni-konstanz.de
Several fly larvae are crawling on an agar surface.
The second paper from the lab is now available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We discovered that cannibalistic behavior in fly larvae is social-context dependent. Larval groups avoid dead conspecifics; individuals show high attraction. They only do it when no one is watching 😉
New paper from the lab, led by @ronjabigge.bsky.social, in collaboration with Kentaro Arikawa. We reconcile contrast and spatial processing functions of lamina monopolar cells by integrating 3D morphology, connectivity and neurophysiology in the hummingbird hawkmoth. tinyurl.com/mvnh3325
For more 👇
Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Fun! Link to original research: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.
My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.
1/6: New publication from the lab: “Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons” by Ryosuke Tanaka (@ryosuketanaka.bsky.social) and Ruben is available here:
rdcu.be/eX1L4
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
We had a lot of fun working on this project (led by Itzel Ishida, not on bluesky). Some interesting highlights from the paper -
Gregor Mendel spent seven to eight years crossing and scoring tens of thousands of pea plants. In contemporary terms, this is known as “a postdoc”
Can biological tissues "learn"? Our new preprint shows that epithelial tissues exhibit emergent behaviors akin to unsupervised learning. Local tension remodeling allows cell networks to store long-range memory and program global elasticity properties.
Read more here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Excited to share our new work on visual information processing in the retinocollicular pathway. We discovered that while luminance responses can predict motion responses in retinal ganglion cells, this prediction does not hold in the superior colliculus cells.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
Really excited to see this great work published! It was an honor and unforgettable experience to be part of this joint effort in @scottvedwards.bsky.social lab!
Congratulations to the lab's first PhD student @maxcapelle.bsky.social for defending his PhD last week! Max not only helped shape the lab from day one, but also made outstanding scientific achievements, which have laid the foundation for future research. Wishing him all the best 🥳
