Calcium spikes know which way the wind blows!
Lily Nguyen and I wrote a dispatch on this fascinating work led by Itzel Ishida+@sethisachin.bsky.social+Gaby Maimon!
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mfk53QW8S...
📢 Join us, the Haberkern lab, @uni-wuerzburg.de for a postdoc studying neural circuit mechanisms of navigation. You’ll spearheading neurophysiology experiments on our brand new 2P!
⏳ Apply by 28th February 2026
Details: www.haberkernlab.de/docs/ENPostd...
#neuroscience #academicjobs #postdoc
My paper on the head direction neurons in the larval zebrafish is now published on Nature! Read it here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This work shows how neuromodulation of presynaptic terminals can enable associative plasticity at inhibitory synapses — a mechanism that may generalize well beyond navigation.
Huge congrats to all the authors — I’m incredibly proud of this study.
Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
This reveals a simple learning rule:
Coincident visual input + octopamine release is sufficient to induce plasticity at an inhibitory synapse.
A two-factor rule for unsupervised spatial learning.
Is it sufficient?
Strikingly, pairing activation of octopamine neurons with a visual cue was enough to drive rapid plasticity — even when head-direction neurons were silenced during learning.
When we disrupted octopamine production in EL neurons, the head-direction network could no longer anchor to visual cues — even though the compass dynamics themselves remained intact.
Octopamine is necessary for the circuit to learn its visual surroundings.
Functionally, octopamine acts like a circuit-level retrograde signal:
it informs presynaptic visual terminals when head-direction neurons are active — without relying on a molecular retrograde transmitter.
EL neurons receive input from head-direction cells and synapse directly onto nearby visual presynaptic terminals — right next to the inhibitory synapses that change with experience.
This forms a local feedback loop.
We discovered that a third neuron type provides the missing signal.
Neurons called EL neurons release the neuromodulator octopamine in a highly localized pattern that tracks the fly’s head direction.
In flies, we previously identified where this learning happens:
Visual neurons synapse onto head-direction neurons, and those synapses change with experience.
The catch?
These are inhibitory synapses — where classic Hebbian learning rules are poorly understood.
Head direction neurons act like an internal compass, combining self-motion w/ landmarks like visual cues.
Because environments change, these circuits must learn how sensory cues map onto internal direction.
Classic theories predict associative synaptic plasticity.
But the mechanism was unknown.
*First preprint from our lab* !!!!!
How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭
led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman:
“Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thread ⬇️
Our lab from @HHMINEWS & @UCBerkeley is looking for undergrads to come for an internship!
www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...
Congratulations! Super well deserved!
Come join our new Department of Neuroscience @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05041
A single neuron in fruit flies can trigger two different behaviors in response to the same odor.
www.cell.com/current-biol...
i wrote an essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social about what it feels like to serve on an NIH grant review panel (study section) right now
www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...
Congrats to MCB's Filipa Rijo-Ferreira on being named a
@hhmi.org 2025 Freeman Hrabowski Scholar! 🎉👏
www.hhmi.org/programs/fre...
Big news this week for the Fisher lab!! It's a huge honor to join this community — and it's all thanks to the amazing scientists in my lab. We're extremely grateful for the support of our research!!
Thank you @marissascavuzzo.bsky.social 🤗
Honored join this community and extremely thankful for support of the exciting research being done by the amazing scientists in my lab!!
Horrible
Believe it a not, a third multisite connectomic project also lost funding. The multi-PI R01 led by @darbly.bsky.social with myself and @bassemh.bsky.social as co-PIs.
The IRACDA program was one of my favorites at NIGMS, good for the postdocs involved and for the institutions where they taught. Terminating it is just idiocy. Well said @ggnanadesikan.bsky.social
This is a super clear and helpful article explaining why the 15% indirect cost rate is unfair, hurts science, and does NOT increase $ for research:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Wow, major breakthrough in the development of broadly neutralizing bispecific antibody therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2, led by @stanford-chemh.bsky.social institute scholar @cobarnes27.bsky.social 😃
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Today's the day! Minnesota, let's show up and make our voices heard to support science!
What a great event! Complete with shout out to @standupforscience.bsky.social
First, we are touring Nobel Prize Chemistry winner Professor Jennifer Doudna's lab to learn more about an NIH-funded CRISPR project and discuss how the NIH cuts will hurt groundbreaking research projects and lives.
