🧵 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...

Cell Type-Specific Hormonal Signaling Configures Hypothalamic Circuits for Parenting Parenting behavior emerges from hormonally sensitive circuits, but how distinct circuit components are affected by, and contribute to, sex and state dependent changes in infant caregiving remains uncl...

New paper alert!!...🤩 Led by @blogeman.bsky.social, we identify how cell type-specific hormonal responses in the hypothalamus tunes parenting behavior in males and females 🐭🧠🍼. Highlights in thread 👇 1/6

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wendy Valencia-Montoya and team uncover thermal infrared as one of the most ancient pollination signals uniting plants and animals. From the field to single proteins.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!

preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵

Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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Cheng Lyu

🎉 Cheng Lyu is the winner of the 2025 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology for his work in understanding how neural circuits assemble with such remarkable precision during development.

Learn more: https://scim.ag/4onaxEE

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

Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution in Drosophila Sexual selection acts on heritable differences within species, driving the parallel diversification of signal production in one sex and behavioral responses in the other. This coevolution implies that...

Exciting new Ruta lab preprint by @annaryba.bsky.social et al. on the neural underpinnings of intraspecific behavioral variation: Strain variation identifies a neural substrate for behavioral evolution Drosophila

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

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum

A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain Although topographical maps organize many peripheral sensory systems, it remains unclear whether olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) choose which of the ~1100 odor receptors (ORs) to express based upon t...

Maps are everywhere in the brain...and finally we've discovered one in the nose! Led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social, we uncovered the logic that specifies the positions of each of the 1,000 sensory neuron subtypes in the nose and aligns their projections to the brain.👇👃see more details below👃👇

Specialized parallel pathways for adaptive control of visual object pursuit To pursue an unpredictably moving visual object, the brain must generate motor commands that continuously steer the object to the midline of the visual field via feedback. Behavior implies that visual...

Many animals use "adaptive control" to pursue moving objects, relying on flexible feedback loops to adjust their movement gain over time. But how do neural circuits actually implement this?

Here, we show how adaptive control in Drosophila pursuit involves two specialized parallel feedback loops.

Thanks Navin!

Tackar tackar! 🙏🏻

Thanks so much!

Thanks Katie!

Male-male interactions shape mate selection in Drosophila Male-male competition strongly influences mate selection in Drosophila, with males performing wing flicks to repel their rivals and jam a female’s perception of other potential mates. Recruitment of p...

Excited see the final portion of my PhD work with Vanessa Ruta out today in @cellpress.bsky.social, in the midst of everything.

In time for valentines day, @rufeili.bsky.social and I describe how competition between males sculpt mating decisions in 🪰🫶.

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Huge congratulations Philipp!! So incredibly well deserved!! Can't wait to hear about all the cool stuff you find 🪰🪰🪰

Excited to have this paper out (rdcu.be/d0T3Y)! In it, we focused on how flies know what to attend to in a complex environment (like below)?

We uncovered neuronal pathways through which social states (like aggression 🥊) modulate visual processing in #Drosophila. #WomenInSTEM #neuroscience 🧪 1/

A platform for multimodal in vivo pooled genetic screens reveals regulators of liver function Organ function requires coordinated activities of thousands of genes in distinct, spatially organized cell types. Understanding the basis of emergent tissue function requires approaches to dissect the...

In collaboration with Reuben Saunders, @jswlab.bsky.social, and Xiaowei Zhuang, we are very excited to release Perturb-Multi: a platform for pooled multimodal genetic screens in intact mammalian tissue.

Check it out!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Animals often congregate in large social groups to find mates. But how does an individual actually pick who to reproduce with? Incredibly excited to share the final piece of my graduate studies – a huge team effort to understand the logic of mate selection in Drosophila. bit.ly/flytriad