Janelia Research Campus

✨ We’re #hiring Theory Fellows!✨

Janelia is recruiting early-career scientists to join our collaborative research environment and use #computation & #theory to tackle bold questions in #biology.

🔗 Apply by Nov. 3 👉 janelia.link/theoryfellow...
@hhmi.org

New computational model could help shed light on how we see Researchers in the Stringer and Pachitariu labs at Janelia set out to create a simpler model to explain what’s going on in the primary visual cortex – the first stop in the brain for visual data.

🧠 Scientists have struggled to build computational models simple enough to understand what individual neurons in the primary visual cortex are doing.

🖥️ Now, Janelia researchers are helping to solve that problem with a new class of simplified “minimodels.”

Activation of RubyACRs in the pIP10 neuron suppressed pulse song of male flies during courtship.

🧠🪰 New from GENIE @HHMIJanelia: far-red #RubyACRs from the Spudich Lab enable robust optogenetic inhibition in freely behaving #Drosophila — validated with ephys, imaging & behavior.
📄 Paper bit.ly/3H7S7af
🪰 Get flies bit.ly/41iVNwK
med.uth.edu/bmb/spudich/
#OptoInhibition #FlyNeuro #FlyOptogenetics

🪰 A new ‘Eyemap’ developed by a team led by Arthur Zhao & @michaelreiser.bsky.social reveals how visual information detected by the fly’s eye shows up in neurons deep in the brain. Remarkably, the eye’s shape determines how flies see motion.👁️
🔗 hhmi.news/4kSZjou

🧠 New research reveals that distinct areas in the brain’s visual cortex are responsible for different types of learning: unstructured, exploration-based unsupervised learning and instructed, goal-oriented supervised learning. #worldbrainday
🔗 www.janelia.org/news/zoning-...

New method enables scientists to surpass the resolution limit of fluorescence microscopy A new method developed at Janelia enables researchers to count the individual molecules contained in a single spot of light detected by a fluorescence microscope—a quantity important for…

🐸 Imagine you’re sitting by a pond listening to the din of croaking frogs. What if you could use the changes in volume of the combined croaking to figure out how many frogs are in the pond?

🔬 That’s the idea behind a new method to count the individual molecules in fluorescence microscopy images.

A new model developed by Janelia researchers to predict the visual responses of individual neurons in the primary visual cortex is an important first step in understanding visual processing & how other brain areas carry out more complicated computations ➡️ www.janelia.org/news/new-com...

📢 Students & postdocs in #TheoreticalNeuroscience 👉 Join us this November for a "by the students, for the students" workshop featuring whiteboard-style tutorials, in-depth discussions, and research talks.

✈️ Travel, lodging & registration covered

Apply by Aug. 5 @ janelia.news/THE25

🏊 Serotonin controls how hard a zebrafish swims as changes in its body or environment effect its effort. Now, researchers are uncovering how neurons figure out when & how much serotonin to secrete – providing new insights into neuromodulation ➡️ www.janelia.org/news/new-res...

💻A new class of simplified ‘minimodels’ developed by Fengtong Du, Miguel Angel Núñez-Ochoa, @marius10p.bsky.social & @computingnature.bsky.social can predict the visual responses of individual neurons in the primary visual cortex, helping shed light on how we see.👀
➡️ www.janelia.org/news/new-com...

ATTN: students & postdocs in #theoreticalneuroscience!

Applications are now open for @hhmijanelia.bsky.social's "by the students, for the students" #neurotheory workshop, which will take place Nov. 9 - 14, 2025.

🥼 Janelia researchers are developing new tools to help accelerate biological discovery, like blinx – a new method that enables scientists to surpass the resolution limit of fluorescence microscopy. 🔬
🔗 www.janelia.org/news/new-met...

Zoning out could be beneficial—and may actually help us learn faster Actions that may seem unproductive – like aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring a new mall – could play an important role in how our brains learn, according research from HHMI’s Janelia...

🧠Zoning out could be beneficial—and may actually help us learn faster.

🥼New research led by @zhong-lin.bsky.social @marius10p.bsky.social @computingnature.bsky.social

🔗 www.janelia.org/news/zoning-...

🚶Aimlessly wandering around a city or exploring the new mall may seem unproductive, but new research led by @zh0ng0.bsky.social @marius10p.bsky.social @computingnature.bsky.social suggests it could play an important role in how our brains learn.‬‬ 🧠
🔗 www.janelia.org/news/zoning-...

In this video you can see a visual map of some of the neurons within a fruit fly’s ventral nerve cord (VNC), like that of a human’s spinal cord. Neurons progressively stack on top of each other and at the end of the video, you can see a rough neuronal map of the VNC.

🧠 Janelia researchers are helping to uncover how neuromodulators reach neurons & revealing a significant role for astrolia in neuromodulation – highlighting the importance of including info about non-neuronal cells in research into how the brain works. www.janelia.org/news/on-the-...

🐟 New research probing the inner workings of neuromodulation in zebrafish could help scientists better understand how the brain enables flexible behavior and provide insight into mood disorders like depression.
🔗 www.janelia.org/news/new-res...

This fiery mixture of red and green neurons in the brain of a mouse shows how interconnected different types of neurons can be. Shown in green are the excitatory pyramidal neurons, and in red are inhibitory interneurons.

Credit: Nelson Spruston and Erik Bloss, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social

New method enables scientists to surpass the resolution limit of fluorescence microscopy A new method developed at Janelia enables researchers to count the individual molecules contained in a single spot of light detected by a fluorescence microscope—a quantity important for understanding...

🖥️A new method developed by Alex Hillsley, @janfunkey.bsky.social & collaborators counts the individual molecules contained in a single spot of light detected by a fluorescence microscope—a quantity important for understanding the underlying biology of a living system.
www.janelia.org/news/new-met...

Learn more ➡️ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🖥️ STIM, a new tool developed at Janelia & @mdc-berlin.bsky.social‬, aligns sections of irregularly spaced 2D spatial transcriptomics data & renders them as images to reconstruct 3D volumes of gene expression, allowing researchers to see how all genes are expressed & organized in 3D tissue. 🧬

New research provides insights into the inner workings of neuromodulation Researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus are decoding how neurons carry out computations carefully calibrated to an animal’s movement and environment to precisely regulate the release of neuromod...

🥼Researchers, led by @mishaahrens.bsky.social, Ziqiang Wei & Takashi Kawashima, are decoding how neurons carry out computations carefully calibrated to an animal’s movement & environment to precisely regulate the release of neuromodulators. www.janelia.org/news/new-res...

🦠 New research led by @aaandmoore.bsky.social‬ @buvansr.bsky.social‬ @vgelfand.bsky.social‬ shows vimentin filaments that provide support & shape to cells are more independent & dynamic than previously thought, providing new insight into their role in cellular processes.
🔗 hhmi.news/4kEYZe2

How the brain distinguishes between ambiguous hypotheses New research finds a brain region critical for navigation uses distinct neural activity patterns to encode multiple hypotheses that help distinguish between ambiguous landmarks. These representations…

🧠 New research led by Janelia Group Leader @jvoigts.bsky.social‬ & MIT's Mark Harnett finds that as we navigate, neural activity patterns can encode competing hypotheses about which landmark will lead to the correct destination. news.mit.edu/2025/how-bra...

Read the paper ➡️ hhmi.news/3Rwop0w

Read more about this work, first published in a #preprint in 2024➡️ hhmi.news/4cGAVUW

🪰 Realistic animal models – like a virtual fly developed by researchers at Janelia and Google DeepMind – could help scientists more fully understand how the nervous system, body & environment work together to control behavior.

🔗 Read the full paper ➡️https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08746-0

🔗 Read our story from when the optic lobe connectome was released as a preprint in 2024 ➡️ www.janelia.org/news/seeing-...

👀 For more than 15 years, Janelia researchers have been on a mission to catalogue the neurons of the fly optic lobes & develop genetic tools to study them. This effort has culminated in a complete inventory of all the visual neurons in the fruit fly ➡️ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🥼 Hundreds of Janelia scientists worked for more than a decade to create tools to study the fly brain, releasing a “greatest hits” collection in 2024. hhmi.news/41EXaGU

⏩ A new peer reviewed #preprint outlines this #OpenScience resource, made possible by our FlyLight Project Team hhmi.news/3QJYuls

👀 For biologists, seeing is believing. But sometimes, biologists have a hard time seeing.

Now, a new technique corrects one particularly vexing challenge: simultaneously imaging all the molecules in an intact tissue sample, down to the level of single cells ➡️ www.janelia.org/news/new-tec...