Catherine (Katie) Schretter

Excited to share the latest work from the lab:
rdcu.be/eRWuD

Great team effort, led by @enriberti.bsky.social first at @unil.bsky.social and now @unifr.bsky.social; with fantastic collaborators @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social and @dahaniel.muench.bio.

Evolution of taste processing shifts dietary preference - Nature Calcium imaging of taste neurons and the ventral brain provides insight into evolutionary divergence of food choice in Drosophila species, supporting a role of sensorimotor processing in addition to p...

Thrilled to share our new paper!
With @tomtom-auer.bsky.social team, we asked how #evolution reshapes what animals #eat to match their ecological niches. Using pan-neuronal Ca2+ imaging, we show that the changes are in how the brain processes #taste.
Link @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Anti-diuretic hormone ITP signals via a guanylate cyclase receptor to modulate systemic homeostasis in Drosophila A multi-pronged approach reveals that ion transport peptide neuropeptide acts through the guanylate cyclase receptor Gyc76C to coordinate osmotic and metabolic homeostasis across multiple tissues in D...

🚀 New paper alert!
Thrilled to share our latest study led by postdoc
@gera_jayati
published in eLife.

👉 doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Continue reading for a summary. 🧵

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?

Specialized parallel pathways for adaptive control of visual object pursuit To pursue a moving visual object, the brain must generate motor commands that continuously steer the object to the center of the visual field via feedback. The gain of this control loop is flexible, y...

Delighted to share an updated pre-print on how adaptive control in visual pursuit is implemented at the circuit level. New behavior and neuronal data in females (!) shows how two AOTU pathways are key elements in both sexes.

Check it out on @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social :
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Convergent evolution of a conserved molecular network underlies parenting and sociality - Nature Reviews Genetics Kay et al. review evidence that parental care, and more complex social behaviour based on parental care, evolved in multiple species through the repeated co-option of members of a pleiotropic molecula...

Parental care, and more complex cooperative systems of care, have independently evolved in hundreds of animal lineages. In an article published today, we explore how these behaviors evolve 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭l shorturl.at/g5OPw /1

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...

Social Reward Learning Deficits and Concordant Brain Alterations in Rats Overexpressing Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) Social deficits are a hallmark of schizophrenia, often characterized by impairments in processing and integrating socially transmitted information. However, translational models that accurately captur...

New paper out in the Journal of Neuroscience! What happens when the brain’s “social reward” circuits go off track? Rats overexpressing human DISC1 show specific deficits in social reward learning, but intact nonsocial learning, …
doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

FlyBase secures funding for year, but future still uncertain The FlyBase team’s fundraising efforts have proven successful in the short term, but restoration of its federal grant remains uncertain.

🪰 folks! I spoke to the Transmitter about FlyBase. As noted at flybase.org, bridge $ ran out and many staff were laid off.

Good news is stopgap contributions will keep core FlyBase operations active. But community support remains essential. Please donate @FlyBase and share! 1/2

tinyurl.com/FlyBase

Visceral signaling of post-ingestive malaise directs memory updating in Drosophila Consolidation is a time when labile memories transition to a stable form. Malaise learning in Drosophila reveals consolidation to also permit memory updating. Flies taught to associate one of two odor...

@senapati.bsky.social latest and greatest! Charly Treiber on board too. Over and out.

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

Thanks so much! Also any comments and feedback would be wonderful and much appreciated - feel free to reach out!

the broader Drosophila and neuroscience fields for all of the amazing previous work that allowed this to be possible!

To search across the wonderful new #malecns on your own, check out male-cns.janelia.org

Major thanks goes to our co-authors, Claire Managan, Marisa Dreher, Elizabeth Kim, Scott Miller, Katie Boone, Alice Robie, Adam Taylor, and @kristinmbranson.bsky.social, the #malecns team, as well as our amazing colleagues @hhmijanelia.bsky.social (in other labs and teams) for their support and… 10/

Across species, behavioral variability is often observed across sexes. These findings and genetic tools provide an unprecedented and experimentally tractable venue for investigating this remarkable axis of variation. 9/

that P1/pC1x and aIPg cell types play a wide-spread role in co-regulating numerous sensorimotor pathways implicated in male social behaviors. 8/

A diagram showing circuits regulating the flow of visual information in females and males, respectively.

In females, we described three circuit mechanisms by which aIPg neurons co-regulate visual pathways, causing the fly to attend to nearby conspecifics.

We were surprised to discover in males that both aIPg and P1/pC1x neurons act in all three mechanisms (as opposed to one in females), and... 7/

Confocal images of the expression patterns in the adult male central brain of some individual split-GAL4 lines that express in P1/pC1x cell types

We also generated 32 new split-GAL4 driver lines targeting single or subsets of P1/pC1x cell types. Optogenetic activation experiments revealed that some drive male courtship song and others regulate male-male interactions – a previously undescribed division of behavioral control! 6/

Examples of strong sensory (i.e. visual and gustatory) inputs to individual P1 cell types.

2) revealed surprising heterogeneity in sensory inputs and premotor outputs across P1/pC1x cell types, suggesting that sensory information is not propagated across the P1/pC1x population, but remains in separate, parallel streams (selected sensory inputs highlighted below). 5/

Summary diagram of the dense connections between the P1/pC1x, mAL and aSP-a cell type groups.

Leveraging the male CNS connectome, we:

1) found that P1/pC1x neurons disproportionately connect to other sexually-dimorphic cell types known to regulate social behavior, mAL and aSP-a neurons, forming a dense network. 4/

Images showing cross-sections of dorsal DM4 hemilineage in the male and female EM, morphologies of all male P1 or pC1x neurons together, or morphologies of individual P1/pC1x neurons in the malecns dataset

#malecns (collaborative effort with @janelia-flyem.bsky.social @camzoology.bsky.social @mrclmb.bsky.social @jefferis.bsky.social @stuartberg.bsky.social @beckett14.bsky.social @mmcosta.bsky.social Philipp Schlegel and others) split P1/pC1x into 48 cell types based on morphology and connectivity. 3/

Elegant experiments conducted across multiple labs have identified P1/pC1x neurons in males as central integrators of sensory information and regulators of social behaviors.

Yet, how the distinct cell types within the P1/pC1x population contribute to different behaviors was unknown. 2/

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/

a group of Drosophila erecta fruit flies on a small food patch. flies on white background

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint

We discovered that the fruit fly #drosophila erecta requires food odor to mate and arousal is further enhanced by social group motion.

Cross-species analysis of brain activity reveals a novel gate evolved from within a conserved circuit

shorturl.at/gGYm7

Are flies a good model to discover and investigate mechanisms of treatments for alcohol use disorder? We validated known treatments and suggest a potential new treatment: gamma secretase inhibitors.

Excited to share our new #biorxivpreprint:
“Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of the Drosophila male central nervous system” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We describe the #connectomics reconstruction and analysis of an entire adult #maleCNS #drosophila central nervous system. 1/10

Female fruit flies use social cues to make egg-clustering decisions - BMC Biology Background The ability to respond plastically to environmental variation is a key determinant of fitness. Females may use cues to strategically place their eggs, for example adjusting the number or lo...

Out now - female fruit flies cluster their eggs together depending on their social environment 🪰🧪 Just wish they'd let us know why... led by @emilyrosech.bsky.social Emily Fowler, Lucy Friend and Tracey Chapman. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Phages communicate across species to shape microbial ecosystems Arbitrium is a communication system that helps bacteriophages decide between lysis and lysogeny via secreted peptides. In arbitrium, the AimP peptide binds its cognate AimR receptor to repress aimX ex...

Our latest work reveals that arbitrium phages cross-communicate across species! These tiny viruses “listen” to signals from others, coordinating lysis-lysogeny decisions across species.
Original idea from @albertomarina.bsky.social and, as usual, he was right.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lab’s 1st preprint!

Menstruation is understudied due to societal taboos + a biological challenge: mice (a key system for research + drug discovery) don’t menstruate.

@cagricevrim.bsky.social made menstruating mice + used them to discover early events in menstruation.

He is on the job market!

Induction of menstruation in mice reveals the regulation of menstrual shedding During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

I’m thrilled to share my postdoc work and the first paper from the McKinley Lab! 🎉
@karalmckinley.bsky.social
We built the first transgenic model of menstruation in mice.
We used it to uncover how the endometrium organizes and sheds during menstruation. 🧪
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧵

A GPCR signaling pathway in insect odor detection Odor detection differs fundamentally in vertebrates, which use G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), and insects, which employ ion channels. Here, we report the first evidence for a GPCR defining tunin...

Having personally sworn for years that insects don’t use GPCRs for odour detection, Suguru Takagi (@sugurutakagi.bsky.social) discovers that, in fact, they sometimes do …

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