John Tuthill

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

After slow-walking critical funding for lifesaving research, the Trump administration has sabotaged the NIH grantmaking process so that researchers get LESS money on average and LESS time to use it.
 
No one is asking to fund less cancer research, but that's what's happening.

Happy to share the first paper from my journey at @psich.bsky.social towards X-ray connectomics, now out in @natmethods.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper showcasing molecular connectomics with pan-expansion microscopy is out in @natbiotech.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This wonderful collaboration with @bewersdorflab.bsky.social was led by Ons M'Saad (now founder/CEO of Panluminate) and @allisonphysics.bsky.social. (1/5)

Check out the newest Editors' (that would be me and Eunjoon Kim) Choice issue in Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

Superbly guest edited by Stephen Liberles and @zknight.bsky.social

>20 review articles on Interoception

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Great story by @carlzimmer.com in @nytimes.com that nicely conveys the excitement for the emerging field of interoception. @dulaclab.bsky.social and others are featured, including my tattoo 😳!

Gift article link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/s...

Incorporating open connectomics data into teaching neuroscience Learn to analyze open neuroscience data and introduce dry lab modules into your existing classes at the Incorporating Open Connectomics data into...

I will be co-teaching a summer course at Allen Institute on connectomics education please apply. Travel support, new connectomics data sets and learning directly from the scientists who built these datasets. Details here: alleninstitute.org/events/incor...

A glorious selfie with the official MAHA lanyard seconds after I made it past Secret Service screening.

About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in.

Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Daily ultrastructural remodeling of clock neurons A cluster of Drosophila clock neurons remodel their axonal arbors daily. Using volumetric electron microscopy at different times of day, Ispizua, Rodriguez-Caron, and colleagues reveal ultrastructural...

SO HAPPY to share our new paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social! Using volumetric EM, we found daily shifts in synapses, vesicles, and mitochondria that accompany neuronal remodeling, linking structural plasticity to changes in how s-LNv neurons influence their targets
www.cell.com/current-biol...

To study how animals understand the physical world (and the rules that govern its dynamics), @jinyao-y.bsky.social trains rats to play fetch with robots 🐀🤖🎾

To learn more, come to our poster Tuesday morning!
[Board W11] Rats learn and use intuitive physics knowledge to solve fetch tasks.
#SfN2025

A bad thing is unfolding at NIH this week: It looks like the Trump administration is trying to replace key civil servant scientific leaders, the Institute Directors, with political hires. These directors control the NIH budget, tens of billions.

A bit of a video explainer here: 1/ 🧪

Confirmed this with an NIH source. At the moment, not aware of anyone else who has been placed on leave though.

Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics Extracting relevant features of a complex sensory signal typically involves sequential processing through multiple brain regions. However, identifying the logic and mechanisms of these transformations...

Excited to share my most recent postdoctoral work in the Jeanne lab @yaleneuro.bsky.social !

“Sensory processing reformats odor coding around valence and dynamics”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We ask: how is a sensory code transformed across multiple stages of processing to inform behavior?

@runewberg.bsky.social congrats Rune and team! This looks really cool

Meet our 2025 cohort of Next Generation Leaders! For the next 3 years, they will network with other rising stars, participate in professional development, and share their ideas for future research directions.

After 13 years in the US, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave. Having packed up everything and rethought about priorities, rather painstakingly, while I’m sad to leave the life I’ve made here, I’m also relieved that I won’t have to plan my life around immigration policies anymore.

thanks, Ish! your feedback is a key reason why we ended up using the p* word

thanks to NIH (as always 🥹) and @hhmi.org for supporting @jonesjes.bsky.social Gilliam fellowship.

Do flies feel pain?

Spooky new preprint from our lab on the cells and circuits that mediate nociceptive behaviors in adult Drosophila, led by graduate student (and newly minted PhD!) @jonesjes.bsky.social.

🪰⚡👻🎃

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

What a time to be alive

Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities?

Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation.

🧵(1/n)
@science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

there is a special lounge in pape heaven reserved for authors who take the time to aggregate and plot out how species vary across a physical variable

🦎THREAD: We just published something wild in @asn-amnat.bsky.social - lizards missing entire limbs not only survive, but some appear to actually thrive in the wild?!

Let me tell you about the "three-legged pirate" lizards 🏴‍☠️

[Paper: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... ]

(1/n)

Excited to announce our new pre-print (www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...)!

This collaborative work (co-led by Adriane Otopalik and Gerry Rubin) examines how neuronal circuits regulate social behaviors, like courtship🫶 and aggression🥊, across sexes. #neuroscience #Drosophila #WomenInSTEM 🧪1/

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad.

I made a video explainer about why.

Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social

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🧪

First snow fly of the season! From our star volunteer collector, Catherine, who was out in the Pasayten this weekend (Mt. Barney). It's rare to find them that far east of the Cascade Crest.

From cognition in the body to the body in cognition Carlos Ribeiro and Albino Oliveira-Maia propose how brain–body interactions may inform the study of ‘higher’ cognitive functions such as learning and memory across model systems.

New essay in @currentbiology.bsky.social special brain-body issue! Fly lab meets psychiatrist: how bodily signals shape cognition and mental health. Great collaboration with Albino Oliveira-Maia showing @champalimaudf.bsky.social discovery ↔️ clinic at its best. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs Dinidorid stinkbugs were reported to possess a conspicuous tympanal organ on female hindlegs. In this study, we show that this organ is specialized to retain microbial symbionts rather than to perceiv...

Wow, nature is too cool! Structures on stinkbug hind legs that used to be interpreted as ears are actually chambers with fungi. The bugs coat their eggs in those fungi to protect them against parasitoid wasps. 🧪

Defensive fungal symbiosis on insect hindlegs | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

my undergraduate advisor rachel merz is the empress of polychaetes and she needs retirement projects: rmerz1@swarthmore.edu

If anyone on here knows how to ID polychaete larva, I’d love to work with you on getting to the species level on these worms I always find in Boston harbor. I could provide a ton of photos, if I knew what to image for an ID. I know they are spionid but that’s it. #sciart #microscopy #plankton

Congrats, Kara! I have told many people about this story after first seeing it at NYSCF last year.