Henry Hallock

Many thanks to the hard-working and dedicated members of my lab who did this work (Liz Ramos, Sam Essig, Abby Harr, Nelly Fadil, Griffen Kempskie), and our collaborators in the Gabel lab at Lafayette. Link here: bit.ly/41ZWP0o

No open access, so DM me if you want a copy!

These effects occurred without differences in response latency or anxiety-like behavior. Why? We think it's because Apoe transcription affects different cell types, and therefore network activity, differently in males and females. We found cellular evidence for this by looking at Fos transcription.

Specifically - Apoe overexpression accelerated task learning in female mice, while having no effect on learning in male mice. In contrast, Apoe overexpression decreased performance in well-trained male mice, but had no effect on performance in well-trained female mice. 3/n

They used an expression cassette to induce Apoe transcription in the mouse frontal cortex, and tested these mice on a touchscreen attention task. The big takeaway is that Apoe overexpression affects males and females differently. 2/n

Super pleased to present the Hallock lab's second article, out now in Learning & Memory! In our first article, we found increased transcription of Apoe in a mouse attentional circuit. What is Apoe doing in this circuit? A super team of undergrads wanted to find out 👇 1/n

It begins...

Had a great time at my first wcbr! Always gratifying to see my kick ass students present their work! Olympic valley is also a crazy mountain. #wcbr2025

Hippocampus does not appear to be a major target of thalamic nucleus reuniens The prefrontal - hippocampal - entorhinal system is perhaps the most widely-studied circuit in cognitive and systems neuroscience, due to its role in supporting cognitive functions such as working mem...

My new year's resolution was to work through the pile of almost-finished papers so... #PrePrintAlert #NeuroSkyence. This is an update to one we put out late 2021, which got delayed with Lilya (lead author) going on maternity leave (yay, lab baby! 🥰). A brief 🧵 1/

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

Grey stone Oechsle Center for Global Education building with pink blooming trees in foreground.

We're hiring a visiting asst prof of sociology at Lafayette College! Come work in a great dept with amazing students. And check out our sweet digs! Spread the word, reskeet wildly, and feel free to contact me if interested! apply.interfolio.com/161664

Stimulation of Locus Ceruleus Inputs to the Prelimbic Cortex in Mice Induces Cell Type-Specific Expression of the Apoe Gene The medial frontal cortex (mFC) and locus ceruleus (LC) are two brain areas that have been implicated in a range of cognitive phenomena, such as attention, memory, and decision-making. Regulators of t...

9/ That's my skeetorial(?) Am I saying that right? I'm still new here. Anyway, paper here: bit.ly/3PpbxrU. Thanks also to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the NIMH for supporting our work. Seems timely to point out that this wouldn't have been possible without science funding!

8/ I'm extremely grateful to Genevieve and other lab members, as well as @martinowk.bsky.social and @aejaffe.bsky.social for their support. It was such a boon to have an exciting project to take with me into my new lab. Would highly recommend if you're thinking of starting a lab.

7/ Which types of neurons? Turns out, it's GABAergic neurons, and the subtype is somatostatin-expressing - but only in female mice! Most literature characterizes Apoe as a gene expressed in glia, but its activity-dependent expression seems strongest in inhibitory neurons.

6/ My first thesis student, Genevieve Craig, repeated the original experiment, but this time with male and female mice. She also used RNAscope to look at Apoe expression in specific cell types. She found that LC induced Apoe expression was highest in neurons (compared to astrocytes).

5/ This was an intriguing (and unexpected) finding. Apoe is best known for its role in Alzheimer's disease, but alleles also correlate with attentional performance in humans. But where exactly is Apoe expressed within prelimbic cortex? When I started my lab at Lafayette, I wanted to dig deeper.

4/ To answer this question, we chemogenetically "activated" LC neurons with connections to prelimbic cortex. We did bulk RNA-sequencing on prelimbic cortex tissue, and found that the tissue was enriched for a host of genes. One gene that immediately popped out at us was the "Apoe" gene.

3/ We wondered: Are there molecular signatures of activation in this circuit? Given that the circuit is involved in attention, biomarkers for activity in this circuit would be valuable.

Electrophysiological correlates of attention in the locus coeruleus–prelimbic cortex circuit during the rodent continuous performance test - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - Electrophysiological correlates of attention in the locus coeruleus–prelimbic cortex circuit during the rodent continuous performance test

2/ This work started when I was a postdoc in @martinowk.bsky.social's lab. We became interested in connections between the locus coeruleus and frontal cortex because we found that these regions interacted during a touchscreen-based attention task that we ran (published here: bit.ly/4fT9tmJ)

I'm a little late, but excited to post about the lab's first paper, out last month in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #eNeuro! We investigated changes in gene expression in the prelimbic cortex of mice in response to chemogenetic stimulation of inputs from the locus coeruleus 👇

For those interested in reading delightful retrospective pieces about the lives and careers of very accomplished memory researchers – there is a special issue of Hippocampus with a bunch of these articles!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/10981063...

I don’t understand why NIDA and NIAAA punish their research force like this, year after year. My original observation that the NIH ICs do not fund Cycle I grants on time (i.e., by Dec 1) under Continuing Resolutions in the absence of Congress acting on an appropriation has been modified in …

I don’t understand why NIDA and NIAAA punish their research force like this, year after year.

drugmonkey.scientopia.org/2024/12/12/i...

Congratulations Tony!!

Not surprising at all. Congratulations @martinowk.bsky.social!

Come and say hi at the Hallock lab posters at SfN before you leave on Wednesday! Two talented undergrads will be presenting what they've been working on for the past couple of years.

How could you turn down having a book sell on eBay?

Working on SfN posters and instead of taking graphs from old poster on same project, decided I didn't like old graphs and spent all day figuring out how to change every aesthetic, resulting in one new graph. What sickness is this?

This is cool!

Lab's first Fluorescent Friday. Who needs hashtags?

A spatially-resolved transcriptional atlas of the murine dorsal pons at single-cell resolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.18.558047v1 The "dorsal pons", or "dorsal pontine tegmentum" (dPnTg), is part of the brainstem. It is a complex,

A spatially-resolved transcriptional atlas of the murine dorsal pons at single-cell resolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.18.558047v1