Keri Martinowich

“Area 10m is the only common ‘driver’ of both pgACC and sgACC”

New connectomic scale understanding of ACC from Daulton Myers and Julie Fudge. #mustread #neuroskyence

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Securing the academic pipeline amid uncertain U.S. funding climate Finding creative ways to keep early-career researchers in academia—for example, through part-time roles—can help the field weather the storm.

Amid shrinking tenure-track faculty positions, we must think creatively to keep early-career scientists afloat, writes @lucinauddin.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

Check out our latest research drop! We show BLA dopamine signaling encodes the emotional weight of sensory transitions, but not the associative strength or value of stimuli. These signals dynamically rescale when the learning context changes: "this matters most!" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#FluorescenceFriday to mark my first foray into human neuroanatomy @lieberinstitute.bsky.social 🧠 RNAscope of marker genes for the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (Ac) in the developing human brain

Peer review reliability is shockingly low. Meta-analyses show reviewer agreement barely above chance, and grant outcomes often depend more on who reviews than what's proposed. Our new preprint with Agnes Urban and Arjun Krishnan @compbiologist.bsky.social : papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 🧵 1/

Dealing with RNA diffusion in Xenium🤠

SPLIT
Spatial Purification of Layered Intracellular Transcripts

+ProSeg improves cell type annotation

vs ResoIVI, ovrlipy

Performance of Xenium target panel vs 5K
60% cells in 5K on lung NSCLC fail QC!🫥

bioRxiv 2025
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

3D mapping of individual immune cells in the vicinity precancerous lesions in the human pancreas.

Maps obtained using the CODA workflow integrated with multiplex IF.

Paper accepted for publication in Cell Press Blue.

Securing the academic pipeline amid uncertain U.S. funding climate Finding creative ways to keep early-career researchers in academia—for example, through part-time roles—can help the field weather the storm.

My latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social: www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

The winner of OneNeuro's February #FotoFriday #FluorescenceFriday contest is "Spatial transcriptomics captures brain regions in the hummingbird bobtail squid" submitted by Alyson Hally in the @loyalgoff.bsky.social Lab at @hopkinsmedicine.bsky.social

View BRAINART gallery: www.oneneurojhu.org/art/

Poking around files for a diagram to share with a colleague and came across these graphics I had drawn of the meninges (I think these are in a chapter from several years ago) - not a
#FluorescenceFriday but rather #FreehandFigureFriday for bespoke scientific schematics ✍️

A neuron from the striatum of an adult rat brain, densely covered in dendritic spines.

These tiny protrusions host most excitatory synapses and change shape as neural circuits strengthen or weaken.

Image credit: Stephanie Huang

#FluorescenceFriday #Neuroscience #Microscopy

#Dros26 Day 1

Comment below your favorite DSHB antibody!

📸 Drosophila brain labeled with DSHB anti-Bruchpilot in blue
🧫 dshb.biology.uiowa.edu/nc82

4D4 is 🏅. Thanks @dshb-antibodies.bsky.social for everything you do! #Dros26 #fluorescencefriday

Best buddies? More like budding buddies 🪼👯‍♀️✨ Six stages of asexual budding in Hydra to generate new genetically identical individuals (clones). 🟣: collagen 🟢: stem cells. 📸 Image by Ben Cox #FluorescentFriday

Super excited about these #FluorescentFriday images 🔬🧪 as part of project led by @drjennkim.bsky.social in @kr-maynard.bsky.social lab to understand the molecular anatomy of VTA-NAc circuitry in the developing human 🧠

Coal trains passing under the Manchester Bridge

A white snowy hillside in the foreground, towering dark trees in the middle ground, and pinky-orange water (the Sheepscot River) and sky in the background.

First daylight savings sunset in Maine.
March 8, 2026. 6:36 pm.

Distinct interneuronal dynamics selectively gate target-specific cortical projections in drug seeking Jeong et al. show that interneuron- and projection-defined vmPFC sub-circuits differentially engage mesolimbic pathways to drive persistent cocaine seeking after abstinence. Distinct interneuron subty...

Our lab is discussing this paper tomorrow in lab meeting. It is a tour de force and an important set of results! Thanks for finding and suggesting this paper ✨ @meortega.bsky.social! www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Longer dive into the data, meaning, and consequences

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Coal trains passing under the Manchester Bridge

for #fluorescencefriday we have the dance of blood vessels by @mind-western.bsky.social @shahrzadbahrampour.bsky.social @nadiahaghbinphd.bsky.social and Vladislav Novikov

microscope image showing green and red dots

Orai1 (Green) colocalizing with STIM1 (Red) in HEK cells using STED microscopy #fluorescencefriday

Confocal micrograph of a mouse embryonic fibroblast with membrane labeled in blue, nuclei in yellow and cellular cytoplasm in red.

Happy #FluorescenceFriday! Here is a mouse fibroblast with multiple thin membrane extensions reaching out toward its neighbors. The long (>10 um) extensions are a type of signaling filopodia called #cytonemes that transport signals like SHH, WNT, Notch, and GFs! 🔬 by Senior Scientist Hong Lin. 🧪 👩‍🔬

An image of frog photoreceptors but in a top down view, so it looks like a fuzzy shag carpet.

Happy #FluorescenceFriday Here is a whole mount frog retina. Every once in a while (also in sagittal sections) I see some very thin rods groups together (in this image I pseudocolored them green). I haven't verified it, but frogs have red and green rods, and I'm wondering if that's what they are.

Cells use proteins like morphogens to talk to each other in order to build and maintain 3D tissue structures. But how do these morphogens reach distant cells when they are all packed together? We think long #cytonemes play a big role in shaping how cells talk to one another for growth.

These brain cells clear proteins that contribute to Alzheimer’s When specialized cells called tanycytes stop working, disease-causing tau proteins build up in the brain.

When specialized cells called tanycytes stop working, disease-causing tau proteins build up in the brain.

go.nature.com/4ldhrez

In imaging-based spatial transcriptomics (Xenium CosMx), 40% RNAs are Not assigned to segmented cells

This amazing preprint @fabiantheis.bsky.social studies the origin, heterogeneity & biological inference (Modeling cell protrusion/contacts😎) of unassigned RNAs

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

With this science piece, there's considerable unrest today about what NSF will fund. My understanding is that NSF on-the-ground is that what falls under the umbrellas of AI and quantum is broad. If you are submitting, consider helping them.

www.science.org/content/arti...

Finally I can join #FluorescenceFriday as a theorist 😊.

This is a DNA-PAINT recording of E-Cadherin and F-actin in Drosophila embryonic epidermis. You can see E-cadherin clusters and their counterparts across junctions. Cover in @biophysj.bsky.social . doi.org/10.1016/j.bp... #devbio #cellbio