Many wild populations are fragmenting and declining, leading to inbreeding.
We are studying how animals avoid inbreeding and the consequences of inbreeding an in a >20 year study of >20,000 wild mice with whole genomes.
We are recruiting a postdoc at Columbia and two PhD students in U Zurich.
Congratulations Irina!
@jlarsch.bsky.social and I are organising the 2026 CIG Symposium on June 11-12 in Lausanne on "Information transfer: from genes to behaviour", featuring an eclectic set of brilliant scientists. Details and registration here (abstracts by May 1, registration by June 1):
www.unil.ch/fbm/en/home/...
It's out! Happy to present ITEC, a semi supervised algorithm with an extremely low error rate that can track cells in files of any size (think Terabytes!). We used it in many organisms, including zebrafish, to study how organs form and linked it to gene expression www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... +🧪
Very grateful to everyone who made this work possible. I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with such an amazing team.
Special thanks to: Jakob El Kholtei, KJ Jenie, @mcolomerr.bsky.social, and of course our wonderful collaborator Bogdan Bintu and my mentor @schierlab.bsky.social
I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be starting my lab as a SNSF starting grant professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics in Lausanne! I'm looking for PhD students who are fascinated about the neuronal basis of behaviour across species @fbm-unil.bsky.social
Yay!! Super happy to be your colleague soon.
First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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
Deadline for this post-doc position in my lab extended to Jan 11th!
Exciting new #Zebrafish research from the #WeinsteinLab, led by Jong Park!
“Specialized gas-exchange endothelium of the zebrafish gill” —
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Amazing to see red blood cells moving through the gills! Don’t forget to check out the supplemental movies ;-)
Slow-mo video of zebrafish mating. Credit to
@zebrafish007.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪
Having personally sworn for years that insects don’t use GPCRs for odour detection, Suguru Takagi (@sugurutakagi.bsky.social) discovers that, in fact, they sometimes do …
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
“Blame your parents if you can’t pay enough attention." At least when you are a zebrafish! Our new study on attentional switching together with Kumaresh Krishnan, @paulapflitsch.bsky.social , @zwitscherarmin.bsky.social and Florian Engert is out in Science Advances:
doi.org/10.1126/scia...
The final version of our paper on how ants and possibly other insects use a crazy mechanism involving extensive transcriptional interference to regulate odorant receptor expression is now open access in my favorite journal, @currentbiology.bsky.social
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
Apply now for FBM #PhD #Fellowships in #Life #Sciences – join one of the Faculty’s leading laboratories.
🚨 Application deadline for fellowships: October 6, 2025.
➡️ www.unil.ch/news/en/1756...
@unil.bsky.social @dmf-unil.bsky.social @dee-unil.bsky.social @dib-unil.bsky.social #fbm #unil
Check out this exciting study led by Anh-Tuan Trinh from our lab, where we investigated how thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish pallium receive, represent, and integrate sensory information:
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
BonnBrain 2026 is a go!
March 23–25, Bonn (DZNE, Bonn, Germany).
Apply now: www.bonnbrain.de
Limited slots. Presentations (posters/talks) selected from submitted abstracts.
Keynotes & invited speakers 👇
Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social
Jim was an incredibly gifted teacher. Still remember his fundamentals in Neuroscience. Also, great, dry sense of humor.
Latest from the lab. Beautiful work from Joanna Lau and a fantastic collaboration with James Fitzgerald.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
Can't wait to read this preprint from Misha Ahrens and team. Calcium imaging in larval zebrafish, in every cell in the body! Amazing.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
If you’re interested in ants, olfaction, gene regulation, or all of the above, here’s a new preprint from the lab for you. It describes an unorthodox mechanism of transcriptional interference by which ant olfactory sensory neurons produce a single functional receptor.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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
1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."
It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.
I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.
A stylised hand holds a smartphone from which colourful digital pages flow outward, surrounded by icons of books, screens, and learning materials on a dark blue and purple background.
💡 Whether you’re a new student, a lab leader or a decision-maker at an institutional level, you can now find free tools and guidance all in one place on our new Learning Resources page.
With everything in the thread below and more, get learning today!
buff.ly/sIpX5gU
Latest from my lab: we identify and characterize the function of binocular neurons zebrafish larvae use to hunt prey; sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... Congrats to Richard Tian, Gewei Yan and Tommy Lam @tkclam.bsky.social!
How does the brain work in natural scenarios, in multi-animal societies of wild animals? 🧠 🧪 🦇
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
(1/n)
🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!
We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️
