Rodrigo Suárez, PhD

Two more weeks before the deadline to recruit a 3-year Postdoctoral position in Systems Neuroscience - Bioinformatics applied to Brain Evo-Devo. Please RT and/or apply at: uq.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/uqcareers/jo...

📣 PhD Opportunity in Mathematical Modelling at The University of Queensland

Marathon runners tap brain-cell insulation for racetime fuel MRI scans suggest runners’ brains might use the fatty substance myelin as fuel. The finding could lead to treatments for neurological diseases.

This finding could lead to treatments for neurological diseases

https://go.nature.com/4c4zHCv

Postdoc Research Fellow-Systems Neuroscientist/Bioinformatician - SEEK Exciting opportunity for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Systems Neuroscience to develop expertise, contribute to research, & engage in supervision

www.seek.com.au/job/82866903 Apply here by April 13th

Elisabeth Vrba obituary: palaeontologist who solved a problem that vexed Darwin The biologist’s theories about how environments prompt rapid species evolution and extinction propelled her onto the world stage.

Elisabeth Vrba has died. May her memory be a blessing.

Here’s an obituary by @nilese.bsky.social.

🌱🐋🧪🗃️🧠🦫🦋 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Interested in complex systems, brain evo-devo, and/or computational approaches to big questions in neuroscience? Check out new opportunities in our lab! 🧠🧬💻🦘🔬🏝️🏄‍♀️😍 Further details and deadlines will be announced soon! #PhD #Postdoc #NeuroJobs

The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations - Nature Neuroscience Sensory experience transforms endogenously structured cortical networks with diverse and unreliable visual responses into reliable representations. This process is proposed to involve the alignment of feedforward and recurrent networks.

The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations

🧠🤖

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

Developmentally distinct architectures in top–down pathways controlling threat avoidance - Nature Neuroscience Through circuit dissection in juvenile, adolescent and adult mice, Klune, Goodpaster and colleagues reveal multiple developmental switches in mPFC–NAc and mPFC–BLA pathways that underlie developmental...

Nature Neuroscience

Developmentally distinct architectures in top–down pathways controlling threat avoidance

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

Should biology put complexity first? The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing damage to its complex nature? The answer might be foun...

"Genes are... the easy part" @philipcball.bsky.social argues biologists need to embrace complexity from the start, rather than beginning with oversimplified "one gene, one trait" models

+1

www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Trump’s siege of science: how the first 30 days unfolded and what’s next The breakneck pace and devastating impact of the administration’s policy changes has shocked researchers.

It matters that scientists speak out against what is being done to US science.

Staying silent is neither "objective" nor "staying out of politics".

Silence now *is* political - it supports the status quo, says "nothing to worry about".

We need to sound the alarm.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Revealed: NIH research grants still frozen despite lawsuits challenging Trump order The Trump administration is exploiting a loophole to keep a funding freeze in place, leaving researchers in limbo.

Almost all grant-review meetings under Trump 2.0 remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget.


https://go.nature.com/4gM6oW4

Want to organise one of our Workshops? You focus on the science, we focus on the logistics. Next deadline for topic proposals: 30 May 2025 The Company of Biologists logo

Do you have an idea for our 2027 #BiologistsWorkshops programme? We cover all costs so you can simply focus on the science. We're now accepting proposals - send us yours by 30 May 2025. bit.ly/4hVT3M0

Rare genetic disorder treated in womb for the first time The child, who is now almost three years old, shows no signs of the often fatal motor neuron disease.

A two-and-a-half-year-old girl shows no signs of a rare genetic disorder, after becoming the first person to be treated for the motor-neuron condition while in the womb.

https://go.nature.com/41a7Zzj

Principles of Biological Autonomy Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy was a groundbreaking text when it was first published in 1979, putting forth a novel theory of how...

"Can a book be ahead of its time by 50 years?! The answer is a definitive ‘yes’ in the case of this phenomenal book by Francisco Varela. A real gem of a book about the philosophical foundations of biology and so much more." - Luiz Pessoa @pessoabrain.bsky.social mitpress.mit.edu/978026255140...

Behind the scenes there has been a lot of work to get the electrophysiology rigs unpacked, built, and tested for our 12 students. From many boxes to 6 fully equipped patch clamp rigs!

Myostatin's flex on the reproductive hormone axis A muscle hormone controls the mammalian reproductive system

A new Science study in mice identifies cross-talk between muscle and the reproductive system and raises questions about interventions to increase muscle mass that might affect fertility.

Learn more in a new #SciencePerspective:

Organ-specific sympathetic innervation defines visceral functions - Nature Multi-modal transcriptomic analyses of the sympathetic nervous system reveal organ-specific neural innervation and modular regulation of visceral functions.

"...we show topological representations of individual visceral organs in the major abdominal sympathetic ganglion complex... one class of neurons regulates gastrointestinal transit, and another class of neurons controls digestion and glucagon secretion" @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.” This is insanity, and could have major impact on entire fields of research worldwide (we all collaborate with one another)

Integrative pathway analysis across humans and 3D cellular models identifies the p38 MAPK-MK2 axis as a therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s disease Naderi and Kwak et al. developed IPAA, an integrated cellular/bioinformatics platform. IPAA derisks drug discovery by integrating Alzheimer’s brain gene expression with cellular model functional reado...

p38 MAPK-MK2 inhibitors (e.g. losmapimod) show new promises in treating Alzheimer's disease. Today @cp-neuron.bsky.social www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

A lot of people who don’t “believe “ in climate change are about to find out that their insurance company does.

Love this. And as a consequence aussies are some of the world's most hardcore commuters...

Source www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsi...

Among nearly 35,000 biological scientists who authored their first paper in 2000, women were more likely than men to have stopped publishing after 5, 10 or 20 years. The size of this gender gap varies between disciplines.

Disappointing new study showing - once again - that women are leaving research careers at far higher levels than men

If you're interested to read about strategies to reverse these types of curves, check out our recent #Cell perspective- link below ⤵️

#WomeninSTEM 👩‍🔬👩🏾‍🔬🧪

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

Sleep microstructure organizes memory replay - Nature The temporal microstructure of the brain can multiplex distinct cognitive processes during sleep to support continuous learning.

Nature

Sleep microstructure organizes memory replay

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

YouTube video by Blue Brain Project - EPFL An extended and improved CCFv3 annotation and Nissl atlas of the entire mouse brain

A beautiful video of the Blue Brain Project's improved CCFv3 annotation and Nissl atlas of the entire mouse brain building upon the @alleninstitute.bsky.social atlas. Recommend watching end-to-end. Great work by Sébastien Piluso @cyrillefavreau.bsky.social and others

www.youtube.com/watch?v=upul...

This is figure 3, which shows the performance of human experts and LLMs on BrainBench.

A study in Nature Human Behaviour shows that large language models—especially BrainGPT, an LLM the authors tuned on the neuroscience literature—outperform experts in predicting neuroscience results and could assist scientists in making future discoveries. https://go.nature.com/3OBWeLV 🧪

Symmetry in Frontal But Not Motor and Somatosensory Cortical Projections The neocortex and striatum are topographically organized for sensory and motor functions. While sensory and motor areas are lateralized for touch and motor control, respectively, frontal areas are inv...

Journal of Neuroscience

Symmetry in Frontal But Not Motor and Somatosensory Cortical Projections
www.jneurosci.org/content/44/3...

Single cells can learn without a brain, but how? Our new preprint from @deeparajan.bsky.social describes a model for habituation in Stentor coeruleus, based on receptor internalization and recycling, along with new experiments inspired by the model. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Whole-brain spatial transcriptional analysis at cellular resolution Recent advances in RNA analysis have deepened our understanding of cellular states in biological tissues. However, a substantial gap remains in integrating RNA expression data with spatial context acr...

Science

Whole-brain spatial transcriptional analysis at cellular resolution
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks To guide adaptive behavior and support predictions in real-life contexts, the brain may rely on opaque, over-parameterized models capable of directly fitting to the multidimensional world, while being...

Neuron

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

First molecule identified that promotes gut healing while inhibiting tumour progression Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have found a molecule that can both help the intestines to heal after damage and suppress tumour growth in colorectal cancer. The discovery could lead to new treat...

Please check the KI press release about our recent story. In it, we found that LXR can unlink the processes of regeneration and tumorigenesis.

We provided a safe alternative to immunosuppressive drugs to treat IBD and a potential treatment for colorectal cancer.

news.ki.se/first-molecu...