Nick Smith

Great news from the Senate appropriations committee

Very excited to share my postdoc work- out now at PNAS!

Learn more about how neurons facing chronic autophagic stress compensate by upregulating two secretion pathways

Autophagic stress activates distinct compensatory secretory pathways in neurons | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How a discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR - Richmond Scientific A discovery in Yellowstone National Park led to the development of PCR, the gold-standard COVID-19 tests used to fight the global pandemic.

Reminder: Nobel-prize winning PCR (1983), used in basically all genetic tech today, was only possible because of extremophile bacterium discovered in 1964 in Yellowstone funded by a small ~$80k NSF grant with no obvious application at the time. #science 🧪
www.richmondscientific.com/how-a-discov...

A hypothalamus–brainstem circuit governs the prioritization of safety over essential needs - Nature Neuroscience Animals need to adapt behavior to balance survival with fulfillment of essential needs. Krauth et al. identify neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that, when activated, prioritize survival over other ...

Excited to present our study in ‪@natneuro.nature.com‬: a deep brain pathway that triggers safety-driven movement—overriding needs like finding food or social contacts. A look into how the brain weighs deep instincts. Congrats to all and first author @nkrauth.bsky.social. shorturl.at/toYFN

Enrico’s flickers like a memory you’re not sure is yours. Somewhere up there, maybe, is grace, or just more fog. San Francisco, holding its breath.

Cool work, I liked seeing the specificity to hunger over thirst. Congrats!

Thrilled to share our latest preprint and first major project from the lab, where we show a mechanism for direct interoceptive input to the insular cortex. Work by the incredible @zhezhao2017 with help from many others including @stefanoberto83.bsky.social

Check out our latest! Studies led by the amazing Megan Brickner - she finds really interesting patterns of dopamine signaling in the basolateral amygdala that report the emotional salience of sensory state transitions. These are largely non-associative, value-free signals, in contrast to classic DA.

Interesting work, congratulations! Do you think there is any difference in inputs to BLA projecting DA neurons that contributes to the different signaling pattern relative to striatal DA?

The gut-brain vagal axis governs mesolimbic dopamine dynamics and reward events Reward-related processes have traditionally been ascribed to neural circuits centered on the dopamine (DA) system. While exteroceptive stimuli, such as food and drugs of abuse, are well-established ac...

Excited to share our latest story: "The gut-brain vagal axis governs mesolimbic dopamine dynamics and reward events" 🎉.

Big congrats to 1st author Oriane Onimus 💪 🥳 & many thanks to all those involved 🙏🙏.

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

My survey class on the history of science is essentially about the social conditions required for science. The final lecture is always about how the US became the dominant nation for research in the 2nd half of the 20th century, and how it in retrospect it may be seen as an anomalous "Golden Age."

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology.

A textbook assumption about the brain’s most abundant receptors needs to be rewritten Neuronal AMPA receptors previously assumed to be calcium impermeable are unexpectedly shown to transport calcium ions.

Research briefing: A textbook assumption about the brain’s most abundant receptors needs to be rewritten

https://go.nature.com/3FDq3KZ

Cutting funds for science and research will save you a penny on the dollar but may one day cost you a life that you love.

Exclusive: NIH appears to archive policy requiring female animals in studies Such a shift would “put us back in the dark ages in terms of our science,” says neuroscientist Anne Murphy, who helped to formulate the original policy.

Exclusive: NIH appears to archive policy requiring female animals in studies www.thetransmitter.org/policy/exclu...

1/ 🧠 Excited to share our new preprint:

Convergent state-control of endogenous opioid analgesia

We uncover how cognitive + contextual factors—like injury, fear, and placebo—modulate pain through dynamic opioid signaling in the periaqueductal gray (PAG)

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cool work! Love the identification of different projection classes.

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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Title: The John Le Carré Advent Calendar - Available in all good bookshops. Description - December 1st to 23rd: open the door to watch Gerorge Smiley reluctantly uncover a conspiracy as he wanders around the damp, dilapidated London of the seventies. (images of six of the doors, showing a stick figure os Smiley going about his business in shades of browny-gray) December 24th: Having solved the mystery and written his resignation letter, Smiley eats Christmas dinner alone. (image of Smiley at a table with a letter, unappetising portion of food and glass of wine, in browny-gray)

The John Le Carré Advent Calendar - My cartoon for this week’s @theguardian.com Books. (with apologies to @realjohnlecarre.bsky.social and @harkaway.bsky.social)

Long a ‘Crown Jewel’ of Government, N.I.H. Is Now a Target (Gift Article) 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.

Signals are in the red.

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

Dear gut/brain neuroscientists -- is there a paper you'd consider groundbreaking in this field in the past ~10 years or so? Like, something that really changed how we thought about the gut/brain connection?

Great stuff, I really enjoyed reading this! The framing of appetitive and aversive stimuli using the same modality is elegant. Also nice to see some lat shell recordings! A too often ignored region.

It Tastes Bad Melissa GIF ALT: It Tastes Bad Melissa GIF

Just in time for Thanksgiving, we're grateful for the publication of our paper in #eLife
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
We measured dopamine and behavioral responses to intraorally delivered sucrose across acquisition and extinction of a conditioned taste aversion.
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How the #brain talks to the #gut and vice versa!
🧪🧠💩

Check out the great primer on gut-brain communication and #interoception by @amberalhadeff.bsky.social and Nilay Yapici

👇👇👇
www.cell.com/current-biol...

My paper is out!! 🎉

"Opponent control of reinforcement by striatal dopamine and serotonin", @Nature

Here, we show that dopamine and serotonin signals form a gas-brake system for reward in the mammalian brain

THREAD ⬇️

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As a kid, I put a sample of pond water on a slide using a little microscope I got for my birthday. To my surprise I found a stentor attached to a speck of green. Seeing that little microscopic life form churning away helped spark my interest in biology. Cool to see how it works!

Nature paper article with title and abstract

🌟 Cai Lab Nature (@natureportfolio.bsky.social) paper alert! In work led by Joe Zaki, we find that rest periods after learning not only stabilize new memories BUT ALSO integrate new memories with older ones from days past! (1/10)

Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

OPEN RANK #FACULTY #POSITION in #Pharmacology & #Neuroscience with expertise in #behavioral pharmacology/neuroscience of relevance to substance use disorders. Review of applications will start immediately. Target start date is Fall 2025. Come join us!

Apply here: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

I've been attending the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB.org) conference since 1996 as a grad student, pdoc, prof and I now have the honor of serving as its President. Its an exceptionally warm group of scientists. Join us in Oxford UK on July 28 for the 2025 meetng!

Too often we spend only two weeks choosing a problem and then many years trying solving it, but this limits our potential impact.
A must read for PhD students: Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38608651/