Ana Marija Jakšić

4) “the complexity of biological phenomena is an argument for the use of mathematical methods rather than against it. In the case of a simple phenomenon we may hope to understand it without the use of mathematics, by simple inspection. But in a complex case we are left hopeless without mathematics.”

I'm looking to recruit a post-doc to help push forward our growing interests in insect ecotoxicology.
Apply here by Nov 30th!
(thanks for reposting)

career5.successfactors.eu/sfcareer/job...

Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience

Very cool, will try it out!! :)

Lol 😆

Family-based selection: an efficient method for increasing phenotypic variability This article introduces a model comparing various selection regimes for increasing phenotypic variability. Individuals with the same genotype, reared in id

Our new study modeling selection for (behavioral) variability has been covered in a lovely @genetics-gsa.bsky.social podcast featuring first author Shraddha Lall and @ecoevogal.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Awesome, congrats!!!

TopoTome: Topology-informed unsupervised segmentation and analysis of 3D images Biological systems are three-dimensional and complex. Today, images of biological structures can be acquired using different imaging technologies and at increasing resolutions. However, identifying re...

(The first concept TopoTome version is now on biorxiv, linked below; stay tuned for the big guns - TopoTome v2)

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

Mouse brain, the next TopoTome step towards the holy grail

Male CNS Connectome A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

"[F]rom the 1940s to the 1970s, a Bell Labs job was said to be just like working at a research university, except the pay was better, the equipment was more up-to-date, the machine shop was available for all your needs and you didn’t have to spend time teaching or applying for research grants."

Figure showing 3 panels. Panel A: workflow of a classical deep learning model vs TopoTome workflow, with marked differences between the methods, including manual segmentation of images, design and optimization of neural network and data post processing that is needed in deep learning workflow but not in TopoTome. Panel B: core concepts behind TopoTome shown connected by arrows. From left to right, there is a microCT scan of a fly brain (3D reconstruction), a persistence barcode of H2 homologies, an image of how persistent barcodes map to the original CT brain scan, and a segmentation of a CT scan. Panel C shows the concept of cubical complex filtration of 2D and 3D image data.

🚨Preprint🚨
What started as an attempt to compare CT scans of diverse fly brains, ended up a new concept for analysis & segmentation of difficult tomographic data. No ground truths, no training, just maths. This is TopoTome, topological data analysis of 3D images

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

The #EDS has the pleasure to announce that, after #EDRC2027 in Bonn, we will have #EDRC2029 in Szeged! Don’t forget these hashtags!

I wonder if the pilot was aware he just flew and safely landed practically the entire Swiss Drosophila fly community to Alicante. High pressure flying the fly people. 🪰✈️

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

The paper itself (with Henry Potter) is here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (and is the European Journal of Neuroscience's most downloaded paper over the last two years! 😊)

Excellent opinion paper, I really enjoyed reading it, especially since it very much resonates with how my lab has been thinking about the brain and mechanistic causes and emergence of individual behavior, resolved by time. Congratulations!

The larger problem is the textbooks frame things in a "X does Y" kind of way. It's very hard to get people to envision a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system and what that will mean for where signals of different types can be observed...I don't have a good answer for this...

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

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

🥳 Thrilled to share that our lab has been awarded an ERC StGrant for our project SigReg: Signal to Regeneration!

How can we unlock limb regeneration in adult mammals?

It’s time to apply what we learned from 🐸 ➡️ 🐭

Thank you @erc.europa.eu for supporting ambitious science!!!

Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️

a man in a red jacket eating popcorn with the words and here we go behind him ALT: a man in a red jacket eating popcorn with the words and here we go behind him

Good luck with this one, lol

No, thank you! Stay strong, we’ll weather this hopefully short storm being a tight community that we are. 💪🏻

My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.

I mean, generally the place was actually really great and there were many people vibing with what I proposed to get to interview, but that one conversation really stuck with me :p

A (not exact) wording was: “you know, today in neuroscience if you can’t get to the neuron level, it will be very difficult to find a way to get it published“

I was unprepared so tried out a few clumsy metaphors. In retrospect, if I’d just yielded maybe I’d get the job 😂 this was my first encounter with emergence resilience. Most recent one, talking to a Nature Neurosci. Editor. Not so much resilience, but like total lack of interest.

I’ve been to a job interview where the view of emergence was 100% challenged by a person (& a director of top neurosci. institution). They said that considering behavior as emergent property of brain’s complex structure is mechanistically useless if there is no way to deconstruct it into pieces.

Indeed! If it is cheap, but more importantly harmless in case your prediction is off. Exaggerated example: if your genotype’s mean is known to have higher risk for heart disease, recommending you exercise regularly is great, but recommending to have exploratory heart surgery is bad

If the policy aims to somehow affect or modify a population, it would be useful. If the policy is to somehow affect or modify individuals, not so much.

Sure you can make predictions but they will be wildly inaccurate. So in practice useless for reasoning about individuals or arguing what is the underlying sources for the trait you measured in 1 individual (genetics or env.) (This is not philosophical, it’s just statistics of a polygenic trait.)