Dinu F Albeanu

Adam Kampff’s passion for understanding and explaining the world was unmatched. Living by example and not ever compromising on his dreams, Adam was uncanny in making people realize they can learn and understand anything and everything. Keep his dream alive!
In his own words: tinyurl.com/ye29csw3

Come join us as a CSHL-Simons Fellow!

supporting bold research programs aimed at tackling fundamental questions across all Neuroscience areas, from NeuroAI to brain body interactions. CSHL Fellows are appointed for 3-5 years and direct their own research groups.

www.cshl.edu/about-us/car...

Apply to the new CSHL grad program in BioAI/neuroAI!

(Masters degree or equivalent required in a quantitative area such as computer science, physics, mathematics, or engineering)

www.cshl.edu/phd-program/...

Human intelligence is overrated and not a useful yardstick for AI - a polemic. markusmeister.com/2025/09/15/w...

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Barcoded Rabies In Situ Connectomics for high-throughput reconstruction of neural circuits Sequencing of oligonucleotide barcodes holds promise as a high-throughput approach for reconstructing synaptic connectivity at scale. Rabies viruses can act as a vehicle for barcode transmission, than...

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵

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

Hi Weijian - it would be great if you could join next year - we were indeed discussing having 2p miniscopes on site as well :)

@trose-neuro.bsky.social @daniobrain.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social ‪@naoshigeuchida.bsky.social @olveczky.bsky.social @benjulab.bsky.social @jvoigts.bsky.social @asheshdhawale.bsky.social @danielavallentin.bsky.social @andreasjkeller.bsky.social

...all due to passion and the enthusiasm of the wonderful TAs and lecturers that make TENSS happen (only some with handles here): @pgupta-cshl.bsky.social @open-ephys.org @antblot.bsky.social @brunopichler.bsky.social @mtkostecki.bsky.social @neuroetho.bsky.social @alecamera.bsky.social

the 2025 TENSSies...juggernaut joy, enthusiasm, curiosity, playfulness and journey of discovery.

ongoing...a new edition of TENSS (www.tenss.ro). thanks to the wonderful people that make it happen yet again!

:)

In Upset, Centrist Wins Romania’s Presidential Election

In Upset, Centrist Wins Romania’s Presidential Election www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/w...

Trump’s Budget Calls for Deep Cuts to NIH and CDC A budget blueprint released on Friday advances, in hard numbers and biting words, President Trump’s assault on the nation’s universities and scientific research enterprise.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/u...

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Inching closer to understanding the physical, neural and perceptual odor spaces. Check out our progress on high-throughput mapping of odorant receptors (OR) to glomeruli and odor responses at the @achems.bsky.social poster tomorrow from Zarmeena, Kira, Walter and @alexkoulakov.bsky.social.

The Promise of American Higher Education No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue

www.harvard.edu/president/ne...

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

Our first look at midbrain PAG’s role in singing mouse vocal control. When near each other, these mice produce two divergent vocal modes. Same circuits for USVs and Songs—or different ones? Bets were made..some of us bought beers for others! Led by @xmikezheng20.bsky.social & Clifford Harpole. 👇🏽

We also note that in land vertebrates evolution has invented a parallel pathway (tufted cells-to-AON and striatum) whose responses resemble more closely those of first-order neurons. This representation may improve odor intensity decoding and localization, albeit with higher energy costs. 3/3

We analyze two plausible decoding schemes (firing rate versus spike timing) by which downstream neural circuits can read-out concentration information, ponder on their constraints, and raise experimentally testable hypotheses. 2/3

An evolutionarily conserved scheme for reformatting odor concentration in early olfactory circuits Understanding how stimuli from the sensory periphery are progressively reformatted to yield useful representations is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. In olfaction, assessing odor concentration is key for many behaviors, such as tracking and navigation. Initially, as odor concentration increases, the average response of first-order sensory neurons also increases. However, the average response of second-order neurons remains flat with increasing concentration – a transformation that is believed to help with concentration-invariant odor identification, but that seemingly discards concentration information before it could be sent to higher brain regions. By combining neural data analyses from diverse species with computational modeling, we propose strategies by which second-order neurons preserve concentration information, despite flat mean responses at the population level. We find that individual second-order neurons have diverse concentration response curves that are unique to each odorant — some neurons respond more with higher concentration and others respond less — and together this diversity generates distinct combinatorial representations for different concentrations. We show that this encoding scheme can be recapitulated using a circuit computation, called divisive normalization, and we derive sufficient conditions for this diversity to emerge. We then discuss two mechanisms (spike rate vs. timing based) by which higher order brain regions may decode odor concentration from the reformatted representations. Since vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems likely evolved independently, our findings suggest that evolution converged on similar algorithmic solutions despite stark differences in neural circuit architectures. Finally, in land vertebrates a parallel olfactory pathway has evolved whose second-order neurons do not exhibit such diverse response curves; rather neurons in this pathway represent concentration information in a more monotonic fashion on average, potentially allowing for easier odor localization and identification at the expense of increased energy use. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

New preprint on common algorithms and evolutionary inventions that may account for apparent idiosyncratic encoding of odor concentration across species millions of years apart by taking advantage of divisive normalization: steered by Yang Shen, @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social and Saket Navlakha. 1/3

openRxiv has arrived!

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of openRxiv as an independent, researcher-led nonprofit to oversee bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world’s leading preprint servers for life and health sciences.
openrxiv.org/introducing-...

#openRxiv #OpenScience #Preprints #bioRxiv #medRxiv

www.thetransmitter.org/funding/u-s-...

How to communicate the value of curiosity-driven research The burden of proof is on us, as researchers, to explain why what we do is valuable to society.

We must learn to showcase the practical significance of basic research, demonstrating how seemingly arcane investigations yield transformative applications, writes @tonyzador.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/outreach/how...

started by Arka Banerjee, Matthew Koh and Francesca Anselmi and brought together by Sanjeev Kaushalya, @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social, @pgupta-cshl.bsky.social with help from: D.E. Hernandez, W.G. Bast, P.S. Villar, H. Chae, M.B. Davis, S. Teja, Z. Qu and V. Gradinaru. An expression of team work. 7/7

This approach also discriminates between different inhibitory inter-glomerular connectivity schemas. We find that short axon (DAT+) cells associated with different glomeruli mediate dense, but heterogeneous (non-uniform) suppression of mitral and tufted cells baseline and odor responses. 6/7

By targeting optically addressable glomeruli, we identify multiple cohorts of daughter sister mitral and tufted cells driven by parent glomeruli, and reveal sparseness and differential action in the olfactory bulb inhibitory lateral interactions. 5/7