🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!

We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Introducing CellBouncer, a unified demultiplexing toolkit built by nkschaefer.bsky.social to check IDs and keep the riff raff out of single cell genomics datasets, including by using genetic variation as an external ground-truth for ambient RNA removal:

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

a man in a green shirt is carrying a pink bag ALT: a man in a green shirt is carrying a pink bag

Picture this: you are running a single cell sequencing experiment and want to incorporate cells from different species, individuals, and maybe even perturbations. You process everything together to save time while reducing batch artifacts. You collect data. What do you do now?

Privileged to preview these excellent studies with @brainevodevo.bsky.social!

Excited to be here for a new start at social media and to share news about my recent paper!

Huge thanks to everyone in the Pollen lab who contributed ideas and discussion and especially to
@brainevodevo.bsky.social, the best coauthor anyone could ask for, and a huge support in putting this together during an incredibly difficult time in my personal life.

In parallel, we cover state-of-the-art methods for producing, growing, and maturing human neurons and assessing their maturation. Also, I would be overjoyed if anyone looks at the extensive supplementary tables I put together on this topic :)

and we propose a (hopefully fun and memorable!) framework of testable hypotheses for future studies of maturation mechanisms.

mechanisms that may contribute to species differences,

We discuss cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic mechanisms and their interactions,

Human neuronal maturation comes of age: cellular mechanisms and species differences - Nature Reviews... Human cortical neurons undergo a protracted period of postmitotic maturation compared with those of other species. Wallace and Pollen review the cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic mechanisms that gover...

I'm thrilled to announce that the review I wrote with
@brainevodevo.bsky.social
is now online @Nature Review Neuroscience: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We cover mechanisms of prolonged human neuronal maturation, integrating lessons from model organisms with studies on species differences.