Ole Christian Sylte

Now that the science days are over, I can happily share some of my designs :)

Thanks to all the @in-code.bsky.social members who made these days a success! It was intense but worth it!

And huge thanks to @sophiekb.bsky.social that was in charge of making this happen

🙋Are you interested in bridging theory & experiments?

Applications are now open for 2026 entry to the Gatsby Unit & SWC joint PhD programme.

Join us and be part of a vibrant research community!

💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme
ℹ️ www.ucl.ac.uk/life-science...

@sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

Applications are now open for the SWC Systems Neuroscience PhD Programme.

Join us in London!

🧠 World-class neuroscience training
💰 Fully-funded 4-year programme
🖥️ Close links to @gatsbyucl.bsky.social

Apply by 3 Nov: www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/content/...

Perinatal fluoxetine exposure increases male rat sexual behavior Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are commonly prescribed to pregnant women due to their efficacy and safety profile, leading to potenti…

🚨New paper alert! We studied the long-term consequences of SSRI use during pregnancy on the offspring in rats in a seminatural environment. We found that perinatal FLX exposure significantly increases sexual behavior in adult male rats.
@uitnorgesarktiske.bsky.social
#neuroscience #neuroskyence

And for me the big question is: What about representational drift? 😄

Manifolds can be mapped, but individual neuronal responses change. That’s neat, but how does it make sense?

How can perception stay stable if the neurons keep changing?
I’m sure manifolds will help us understand that too…

🧠🧪
3/3

Behavioral and neural alterations of the ventral tegmental area by exposure to junk food in rats The brain reward system is essential for regulating appetitive and consummatory behaviors in response to various incentive stimuli. Junk food, charact…

🚨 New Article Alert! 🚨
Our latest research reveals how long-term consumption of a cafeteria (CAF) diet impacts the ventral tegmental area in rats. 🍔🍟🍩#Neuroskyence @uitnorgesarktiske.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New preprint alert! Perinatal fluoxetine exposure increases male rat sexual behavior. @uitnorgesarktiske.bsky.social #neuroscience #neuroskyence

Dopamine neurons signal default behavior to reinforce habits Movement-sensing neurons in the striatum influence a mouse’s choice of action by favoring routine behaviors.

A non-value-based system in the brain automates decision-making and frees up cognitive resources for other tasks, a new study in mice suggests.

By Holly Barker

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neurobiology...

Long-term hippocampal low-frequency stimulation alleviates focal seizures, memory deficits and synaptic pathology in epileptic mice Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) is a prevalent form of focal epilepsy characterized by seizures originating from the hippocampus and adjacent reg…

A new paper from the group is online: we show that longterm low-frequency stimulation alleviates seizures beyond stimulation periods and reverses epilepsy-associated synaptic alterations. #TrEPILab

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Looking forward to an exciting Spring Hippocampal Research Conference in Verona with @mbartos.bsky.social @olechsylte.bsky.social @federicotorelli.bsky.social and @ute-fr.bsky.social

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

Impressive study in @nature from my colleague Marcus Stephenson-Jones at UCL in the @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

Read the full paper ‘Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal’ in @natureportfolio.nature.com

@gatsbyucl.bsky.social @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats to Aurore Gazala for winning the Eve Marder Best Paper Prize for “Subfield-specific interneuron circuits govern the hippocampal response to novelty in male mice” (Nat Comm, 2024) - awarded in person by Eve Marder at the IN-CODE retreat in Potsdam! @acazala.bsky.social #interneurons

Play the "IBNS 2025 Reindeer Games Contest"! Share one of the reindeer adds on social media and get the most likes! @ibnsconnect.bsky.social

1st prize - $100 Gift Card or $200 off IBNS Registration
2nd prize - Free one year IBNS regular membership or two years Student/Postdoc membership

Don't miss your last chance to attend IBNS in Tromsø!

Really amazing!

Mouse watching its axons

🔬🤝🎨
Drawing over my 2photon recordings of axons in the dentate gyrus for our last picture contest ✨️

Coordinated representational drift supports stable place coding in hippocampal CA1 The phenomenon of representational drift (i.e., changing neuronal tuning during repeated exposure to the same stimuli), is a fundamental paradox in neuroscience that raises the question how stable beh...

Check our new manuscript on ‚Coordinated representational drift supports stable place coding in the hippocampal CA1’
by Ole Sylte, Antje Kilias, Marlene Bartos and Jonas Sauer.

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

Conjoint generalized and trajectory-specific coding of task structure by prefrontal neurons Neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) show spatially modulated activities. Muysers et al. show that mPFC neurons fall into distinct functional classes that differ in terms of their spatial tu...

New paper out! We found functional neuron classes in the mPFC with different spatial tuning properties (generalised vs. trajectory-specific) and distinct contribution to the encoding of task space. Great job by the first author Hannah!
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

New from the lab!! 👉🏼 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kgT43BtfH... 📝 @cellpress.bsky.social We discovered that genetically-defined neuron types in the hippocampus form unique manifolds! Dual color imaging, chemogenetics and topological analysis all at once! With Juan Gallego @juangallego.bsky.social

Drawing of a researcher performing analysis at his desk

Slow life as a scientist

Mice dynamically adapt to opponents in competitive multi-player games Competing for resources in dynamic social environments is fundamental for survival, and requires continuous monitoring of both 'self' and 'others' to guide effective choices. Yet our understanding of ...

First preprint from our lab! An @jerlich.bsky.social collaboration

We developed novel frameworks to study multi-agent decisions in mice.

Mice flexibly shift their decision preference under social competition, by integrating real-time self and opponent information!

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

Don't miss the chance to present at the world's northernmost university city while catching the midnight sun 👇

Huge thanks to co-first author @antjekilias.bsky.social for impressive experimental work, and to Marlene Bartos and @jf-sauer.bsky.social for their supervision!

How does this help downstream neurons?

If drift is coordinated (preserving geometry), downstream neurons can compensate and read stable spatial maps. But if drift distorts the geometry, a downstream network fails under noise.

How can the geometry be stable while individual neurons drift?

It turns out the entire population activity is gradually rotating and translating in neural state space. These two transformations can accurately account for the observed drift.

Because the internal geometry remains stable, we can align neural activity across days and recover stable spatial tuning.

Crucially, this only works for coordinated drift - it fails for recovering ‘remapping’ across context or simulated uncoordinated drift.

In a new environment, internal geometry is initially unstable but gradually stabilizes with experience. This suggests that geometric stability is learned over time!

However, these changes aren’t random! Instead, the entire population shifts in a coordinated way that preserves its internal geometry - like a constellation moving across the night sky while keeping its overall shape.

To address this, @antjekilias.bsky.social (co-first author) performed multi-day 2-photon imaging of CA1 pyramidal neurons while mice navigated a virtual environment. As expected, the spatial map drift across days.