Catherine (Katie) Schretter

With @megyounger.bsky.social's lab, et al., we present the first connectomics work in the disease-vector mosquito Aedes aegypti, revealing how its brain is wired to detect host cues.

Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#Neuroscience #Connectomics #vEM #VectorBiology 🧪

Recurrent connectivity supports carbon dioxide sensitivity in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes The mosquito Aedes aegypti′s human host-seeking behavior depends on the integration of multiple sensory cues. One of these cues, carbon dioxide (CO2), gates odorant and heat pathways and activates hos...

New preprint from @darbly.bsky.social‬ @briandepasquale.bsky.social‬ and my labs! If you love (or hate) mosquitoes, have a look:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We used TEM to describe the circuitry used for CO2 detection by mosquitoes. As usual with mosquitoes, nothing is as expected! 🌬️🦟

a man with a mustache in a blue suit says tiny celebration in front of a group of people ALT: a man with a mustache in a blue suit says tiny celebration in front of a group of people

Happy Friday! The female adult fly brain-and-nerve-cord (BANC) connectome is now LIVE!

Explore the data here: codex.flywire.ai?dataset=banc

Check out the preprint here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

With many postdoc grants like the NSF PRFB, Ford Fellowship, and Hanna H. Gray fellowships disappearing, I am currently looking for grants that could fund incoming postdoctoral scholars. Here is a thread of some of them 🧵

Compositionality of social gaze in the prefrontal-amygdala circuits Each social gaze can be deconstructed into primitive components, including gaze content, social state, and gaze duration. To reduce dimensionality and facilitate generalization, the brain needs to rep...

Super excited to share this new work from the lab (led by Guangyao Qi)! We demonstrate compositional social gaze codes in the prefrontal-amygdala circuits, by testing three predictions from the compositionality hypothesis. 👇👇

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

Well, none of us may ever get funded again but in the meantime, here's some new science!

Led by recent PhD Anjali Pandey w/ex-UG Maya Katz. Here we identify an asymmetric molecular mechanism that underlies symmetric context-dependent sensory plasticity in the AWC olfactory neuron pair in C. elegans

#FlyCROSS mentee surveys are open for #earlycareer #Drosophila scientists. If you're a #gradstudent #postdoc or pretenure faculty or equivalent - fill up the survey by Sept 1 to participate & be matched by #mentor of your preferences to gain guidance to your unique needs. @flybase.bsky.social

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Preprint Alert! Walking mostly feels natural and easy to us - but the neuronal control of walking is actually incredibly complex. We leveraged the fruit fly as a genetically tractable animal model with a compact nervous system to ask how the brain controls walking direction: tinyurl.com/flywalk. 🧵..

New preprint from Yipei Guo and Ann Hermundstad (@hhmijanelia.bsky.social) - a wonderfully in-depth investigation into environmental variability and optimal behavioural strategies.

The neural basis of species-specific defensive behaviour in Peromyscus mice - Nature Visual threat triggers contrasting freeze and escape defensive responses in two species of deer mice as a result of different activation thresholds downstream of the superior colliculus in the do...

Finally it's out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... How flexible are essential innate behaviours and their underlying neural circuits? @felixbaier.bsky.social & I, with Hopi Hoekstra and @farrowlab.bsky.social, addressed this by studying the #evolution of threat avoidance in Peromyscus mice.

Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments - Nature Tracking of individual place cells in mouse CA1 shows that representational drift is not influenced by changes in environment or behaviour, and is lower for more excitable place cells.

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

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

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

This summer my lab's journal club somewhat unintentionally ended up reading papers on a theme of "more naturalistic computational neuroscience". I figured I'd share the list of papers here 🧵:

What does a neural network look like? Maybe like this view of Larissa Heinrich's U-net for organelle segmentation, with edges between layer inputs and outputs.

Want to help build networks like this? Join #HHMIJanelia's new AI initiative as a data engineer:
hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

beyondthelabworkshop October 20-25th, 2025 Montevideo, Uruguay

Beyond the Lab Workshop - Naturalistic Approaches in Neuroscience! join us in Montevideo, Uruguay, 20-25 October sites.google.com/view/beyondt...

As requested - A Starter Pack of PIs in Biology (or related fields) who are recruiting PHD STUDENTS! If you would like to be added, feel free to ask! go.bsky.app/Bf4DRFm

5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet AI is more than just chatbots! Learn about how AI can be used to protect biodiversity, fight climate change, and just better understand our planet through 5-minute explainers covering academic papers ...

For the past 3 years, I've taught a course on Machine Learning for Climate Change to undergrads. At times, people have asked if the course lectures could be made available online. While I can't offer that, I have decided to start making "5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet" videos. Hope its useful!

Research Analyst - Laboratory of Behavioural Neuroendocrinology-camh

Job alert: We're looking for someone to help us produce a female-specific risk calculator for Alzheimer’s disease! 🧠 Key qualifications are experience w/ large databases, project management, and women's health research. See posting for more info: shorturl.at/zkO8V

Expanding the Bacteroides synthetic biology toolkit to develop an in vivo intestinal malabsorption biosensor. The human gut is a highly dynamic physical environment where perturbations - including factors such as acidification, oxygenation, and particle concentration (osmolality) - can influence microbiota co...

Sharing exciting work led by PhD students McCallum and Burckhardt! We created a new series of syn bio tools in Bacteroides to create non-invasive, real time and sensitive in vivo gut biosensors. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Please repost! We're hiring a postdoc to work with me and
@salagapan.bsky.social on an exciting interdisciplinary project in human neuroscience and brain-body interactions underlying effortful behavior in health and mood disorders.

siplab.gatech.edu/postdoc_ad_2...

A cell type in the visual system that receives feedback about limb movement Hartman et al. describe a cell type in the Drosophila visual system that is activated during head grooming through visual and non-visual signals arising from foreleg movements. These neurons inhibit a...

New paper from our lab! This was such a fun project to be a part of - proof that sometimes following a spurious observations down the rabbit hole leads to awesome findings.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Research Specialist - Tavakoli Lab Primary Work Address: 19700 Helix Drive, Ashburn, VA, 20147 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus is a pio...

🧠 Excited by synapse-level brain mapping? Join us at a world-class institute to build molecular tools based on our new #LICONN work — and push the frontier of #MolecularConnectomics. Let’s decode the brain, one synapse at a time.

hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Junior, Assistant, or Associate Specialist – Xue Lab University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more.
recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

POSTDOC🚨
With the excellent @anshika22.bsky.social moving to UCI 🥲Anna Zemke and I are again recruiting a postdoc on the HOST-PATHOGEN BIOLOGY of TRACHEOBRONCHITIS. This is a microbiome-device-host immunity problem of broad significance.

Contact Dr. Zemke (zemkea at upmc dot edu) if interested! 👇🏻

My colleague David Garfinkel is looking for a postdoc to join our NIH-funded project on the “Evolution of Retrotransposon Control Mechanisms”

More info here: reporter.nih.gov/search/u7dKr....

The official job listing can be found here: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/437...

Please repost! #TEsky

Are you a PI in a biology field looking for students to join your lab as a PhD student? I made a Starter Pack to help PIs and potential PhD students connect! If you would like to be added to this pack, please let me know! go.bsky.app/EFj87fi

go.bsky.app/8zZNEGV

Great resource to connect early career folks with more senior scientists looking to hire postdocs! 🧪

Let's share @etlunsford.bsky.social's work : to survive, animals avoid drifting involuntarily in their environment. While humans rely on visual & vestibular cues, birds & fish need to sense complex flow changes of the external fluid (air/water) around them to select motor actions. How do they do?(1)

Ontogeny of the vagal gut-brain axis Gut-brain communication is a key component of homeostasis which regulates behaviors such as appetite and reward. Intestinal entero-endocrine cells (EECs) translate nutrient intake into signals which a...

First Bluesky post! I'm excited to share a preprint from my postdoctoral work where we 1) define the developmental mechanisms guiding formation of a vagal gut-brain circuit and 2) discover that this circuit regulates much more than just appetite. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Graphical abstract for "Vocal communication is seasonal in social groups of wild, free-living house mice." The abstract has, from top to bottom, a title, four middle image panels, and two bottom text panels. Image title: "Vocal communication in social groups of wild-free living house mice" Middle image panels from left to right: (1) An aerial snap shot of the region where the study site is located, an agricultural landscape in rural Switzerland. (2) An image of the study site, a small barn in the forest inhabited by mice. (3) An image of a radio frequency identification (RFID) box used to track mouse social interactions. A mouse is entering the box from the left while another sits outside. (4) A spectrogram showing example vocalizations - one low frequency squeak and one ultrasonic call - recorded from an RFID box. Bottom panels: Left: Data Collection  - 10 years of RFID-based tracking data (from 6,946 mice) - 15 months of acoustic monitoring (totaling 6,594 hours) - Machine learning for vocal detection and labeling (CNN) Right: Key Findings - Vocalization is seasonal (most in spring and summer) - Vocalization is associated with the presence of pups - Vocalization is correlated with social group dynamics

Very happy to share the latest from my postdoc‬!

10 yrs of mouse social networks + 1.25 yrs of acoustic data ➡️ insight into vocalization & sociality in a wild population of your favorite lab model 🐁

paper: bit.ly/4n93yyD
data: bit.ly/4lfFBEk
code: bit.ly/4kNnMwx

#bioacoustics #neuroskyence

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Happy to present a single cell atlas of ALL glia, in BOTH sexes of an animal (in vivo validated!)! Fab work by postdoc @glia-maria.bsky.social, team, & collaboration with @manusetty.bsky.social . Find insights into glia, new analytics and ML models, and browse our companion website (wormglia.org)