Jeremy Kay

I wrote a quick-start guide for people to replicate this across the country. It was, in our experience, a very effective way to get real action in a short amount of time.

People are willing to talk to scientists! And when you provide everything, they are happy to contact their reps too. Try it!

Congrats!!

I have previously posted about the slow issuance of NIH award in fiscal year 2025 compared to fiscal year 2024.

jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...

These data were across all of the institutes and centers at NIH.

The results can be examined for each institute and center.

1/n

Check out our new preprint! Microglia in different layers of the developing retina express distinct gene profiles - implications for how microglia influence development not just in the retina but throughout the CNS.

Image of north carolina with text looking for north carolina volunteers

☀️📣 Looking for a STATE LEAD and VOLUNTEERS to help us #standupforscience2025 in North Carolina!

Know someone interested? Fill out this form: airtable.com/app4h5wUssMG...

#scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Let's just say it gets bigger everyday... @standupforscifr.bsky.social

We're doing this for the next generation of scientists. To uphold the integrity of science, protect its accessibility, and ensure its benefits serve all people.

Join us.

@standupforscience.bsky.social

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, led by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) - a gastroenterologist with an MD from LSU, just released a report entitled NIH IN THE 21st CENTURY: ENSURING TRANSPARENCY AND AMERICAN BIOMEDICAL LEADERSHIP. Since he is the ranking Republican,

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Horace Barlow, by all accounts, was thinking about 30 years ahead of his time. Here is a transcript of the opening keynote I gave at a symposium honoring Horace's scientific legacy: markusmeister.com/2024/12/14/h....

3 reviews on planning, execution, & validation of transcriptomic experiments in neuroscience published in @natureportfolio.bsky.social #NatureNeuroscience.
A MUST READ if you're doing transcriptomics.
3 reviews, an amazing editorial, a beautiful cover – this is the issue of the year!
(mini thread)

Transcriptomic changes in retinal ganglion cell types associated with the disruption of cholinergic retinal waves In the early stages of retinal development, a form of correlated activity known as retinal waves causes periodic depolarizations of immature retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Retinal waves are crucial fo...

New preprint! A wonderful collaboration of our @FellerMarla lab with Matthew Po, and @shekharlab. Here, we dive into the impact of spontaneous activity on the transcriptome of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), the sole output neurons of the retina. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

RNA-programmable cell type monitoring and manipulation in the human cortex with CellREADR https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.03.626590v1

Long a ‘Crown Jewel’ of Government, N.I.H. Is Now a Target The agency long benefited from broad bipartisan support. But Republican criticism has intensified, and new choices for top health posts hope to upend the organization.

“While even the agency’s defenders acknowledge that the NIH needs modernization, the radical reforms proposed would be difficult, if not impossible, without YEARS of legal wrangling and significant support from Congress”

Exactly! So let’s work on allies in congress

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/h...

Aspects of Symmetry For almost two decades, Sidney Coleman has been giving review lectures on frontier topics in theoretical high-energy physics at the International School of Subnuclear Physics held each year at Erice, ...

Parable time: After the incredible successes of quantum electrodynamics in the late 1940s, particle physics went through what is now considered a pretty fallow period in the the 1950s and 60s. Many interesting ideas from that time that survived (selectively summarized much later in Coleman) 1/n

While our bodies seem static, our cells are constantly changing shape or on the move during tissue homeostasis or wound repair & even more dramatically during embryonic development, during events like gastrulation. Defining how cellular machines mediate these events is a key task for our field 1/n

An image showing a labelled red and green colored retina on the left hand side with a white circled bipolar cell. On the right hand side, the circled bipolar cell is shown to scale in comparison with a pyramidal neuron from the brain. It is about 1/10th the size, and barely visible.

This is one of my all-time favorite figures. It shows the size comparison between a retinal bipolar cell and a cortical pyramidal cell in a mouse. Scale bars are great and all but sometimes the sizes just don't compute.
Masland. (2012). The Neuronal Organization of the Retina.
🧪 #neuroskyence

Excited to publish a broad set of enhancers to target interneuron types in the brain, along with a broad set of collaborators. Part of the BI armamentarium. Together this will help revolutionize the targeting of brain circuits.https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.17.603924v2

New @bioRxiv #preprint with @chiarafornetto.bsky.social and @teuler.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🙋‍♂️

There are lots of us missing, but so many joining so quickly

Please do share, and comment below to be added

go.bsky.app/5f2V6L6

(microglia starter pack also here by @mancusorenzo.bsky.social - bsky.app/starter-pack...)

go.bsky.app/Eaua5Jk my starter for neuroimmunology

go.bsky.app/SxcKi5z

Neural development community coming together like Voltron with Sergiu’s Starter Pack!

Confocal microscope image of mouse retina labeled with antibodies for PKCalpha (red), TRPM1 (yellow), and 4.1B (cyan).

The retina provides pretty pictures even when antibodies misbehave. I'm calling this one "bipolars in a starry sky".

"However, since the specific aims are abstracted for internal management and public reporting, including figures can interfere with application processing. Please advise your colleagues and other investigators not to include figures in the Specific Aims attachment of an NIH grant application."

Our paper on retinal mosaic patterning came out in today’s issue of Cell Reports. See below for a thread I wrote last fall and check out the full paper here: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Congrats to co-authors Chris Kozlowski and Sarah Hadyniak!

A sign-inverted receptive field of inhibitory interneurons provides a pathway for ON-OFF interaction... In the retina, visual information is segregated into ON (light increment) and OFF (light decrement) streams. Here, the authors identify a sign-inverting amacrine cell with an inhibitory ON center – ...

Once again, retinal neurons challenge textbook knowledge about wiring patterns and functional properties ❤️ 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

very nice! possibly relevant, we showed making more copies of a neuron is sufficient to create tiling by homotypic repulsion (heimanlab.com/content/2016...) -- I wonder what you minimally would need to express in another cell type to get it to be treated as part of the mosaic by starburst amacrines?

MEGF10 and MEGF11 mediate homotypic interactions required for mosaic spacing of retinal neurons - Pu... In many parts of the nervous system, neuronal somata display orderly spatial arrangements. In the retina, neurons of numerous individual subtypes form regular arrays called mosaics: they are less like...

We did show that misexpressing Megf10 indiscriminately will cause starbursts to avoid the misexpressing cells (see here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22407321/) but this isn’t quite the same thing.

Yes of course I remember this super cool paper from your lab! We always wanted to test if misexpressing Megf10 in another cell type would suffice to incorporate those neurons into the starburst mosaic. But we never found the ideal way to do the experiment.