Inbal Shainer

a shark with its mouth open is swimming in the water Alt: a shark with its mouth open is jumping out of the water

You love fish? We are looking for you!

We are hiring a Postdoc and a PhD student for our project on the effects of sleep deprivation on brain-heart communication!

Life imaging and behavior in zebrafish.

More information:
ncloud.lin-magdeburg.de/s/g3FeXEnJNb...

What's the relation between voltage and calcium in dendrites? Xiang Wu studied this in CA2 hippocampal pyramidal cells in behaving mice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Convergent thyroid-ATPase interactions regulate collective behavior in Danionella Zada, Kadobianskyi et al. develop methods for measuring and manipulating gene expression in the schooling glassfish Danionella cerebrum, identifying circadian genes and the thyroid-klf9-atp1a1 pathway as commonly regulated across multiple models of impaired or immature collective behavior.

Convergent thyroid-ATPase interactions regulate collective behavior in Danionella

Engineering a Mechanoresponsive DNA Origami Capsule for Drug Delivery to Narrowed Arteries Since their inception, DNA origami nanostructures (DONs) have attracted great interest for their programmable geometry, nanoscale precision, and biocompatibility. Here, we present mechanoresponsive DO...

Engineering a Mechanoresponsive DNA Origami Capsule for Drug Delivery to Narrowed Arteries pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Glad we could contribute to this interesting work from Yuval Garini's lab. Kudos to Hadas Omer and the team:
Hadeel_Khamis, Zipora Lansky, Netanel Korin, Racheli Boeangiu

Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons - Nature Using two-photon microscopy with a panoramic virtual reality setup, how head direction cells in larval zebrafish integrate visual landmarks and optic flow to track orientation is revealed.

Nature research paper: Plastic landmark anchoring in zebrafish compass neurons

go.nature.com/4qP4HwB

Excited to see this preprint out! Siyuan Mei did exceptional work leading this project, and it was a great experience working with the Herz lab. How do zebrafish update their internal compass? They use a multi ring shifter network, similar to flies despite 550M years of divergence. Full thread ⬇️

Congratulations!

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Do direction and orientation preferences form maps in the mouse superior colliculus (SC)?
We examined how motion and orientation tuning are organized in SC neurons and their retinal inputs—and how the retinal topography is transformed by collicular circuits.
tinyurl.com/mr2zt5rm

🧵👇

The Elkouby Lab - Cell and developmental biology of early oogenesis The Elkouby Lab Illuminating unpredicted cellular machineries in gonad development, germ cell production, and reproduction A Journey to Before the Beginning of Life Exploring the Unknown Developing eg...

🥁We are recruiting PhD students/Postdocs with strong proven background in developmental/molecular/cell biology & related areas, for various projects- check out our lab website👇🏼

We offer: competitive stipends, super equipped lab, fun international team!

yanivelkoubylab.com

A study from the Baier Departement, published in Nature in February 2025, has now been selected for the Nature Highlights List 2025.
Congratulations to all the researchers involved on this well-deserved recognition!

👉 Nature Highlights 2025: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@ishainer.bsky.social

Asteroids, antibiotics and ants: a year of remarkable science Highlights from News & Views published in 2025.

Very proud to see our paper selected as one of Nature’s 2025 highlights!
@johanneskappel.bsky.social @jlarsch.bsky.social @mpiforbi.bsky.social

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

Very excited to share this thread on our recent paper! We show how Zebrafish integrate visual navigation signals in aligned topographic maps. Full thread below🧵

Visual motion and landmark position align with heading direction in the zebrafish interpeduncular nucleus - Nature Communications How are various visual signals integrated in the vertebrate brain for navigation? Here authors show that different spatial signals are topographically organized and align to one another in the zebrafi...

(1/n) We are excited to share our new paper in Nature Communications, by Hagar Lavian (@hlavian.bsky.social) and team, revealing how the zebrafish brain integrates visual navigation signals! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Trojan Horse Gene of the Marine Virus - הטכניון-מכון טכנולוגי לישראל

The Trojan Horse Gene of the Marine Virus www.technion.ac.il/en/blog/arti...

When a larval zebrafish twitches its tail, the vascular endothelium lights up with a calcium signal, mediated by Piezo1. We used to think mechanosensing in endothelial cells was about sensing blood flow, but at least in this case it's about sensing body motion.

the sun is shining through the clouds in the sky above the ocean ALT: the sun is shining through the clouds in the sky above the ocean

Viral NblA proteins negatively affect oceanic cyanobacterial photosynthesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...
this project was led by @omernadel.bsky.social and is a joint work between the labs of @bejalab.bsky.social, Debbie Lindell and Oded Kleifeld from @biologytechnion.bsky.social

New work from Baier Lab 🧠 🐟

🔗 to paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Images of two zebrafish larvae - one with a light, the other with a darker background.

How does a fish know when to blend in? Scientists identified a key circuit controlling camouflage in zebrafish – from cells in the retina sensing light to nerve cells in the brain controlling the release of a hormone that pales the skin to match bright backgrounds.
www.bi.mpg.de/news/2025-11...

Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background Vertebrate eyes first evolved in water, where spectral content rapidly fades with distance. Zebrafish exploit this loss by antagonizing cone signals to suppress the background, pointing to distance es...

Excited to share our paper now published in Cell!
'Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background'

Huge thanks to @neurofishh.bsky.social & @teuler.bsky.social

@cellpress.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social

👇🏻
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background Vertebrate eyes first evolved in water, where spectral content rapidly fades with distance. Zebrafish exploit this loss by antagonizing cone signals to suppress the background, pointing to distance estimation—rather than color—as an ancestral cone function.

Now online! Zebrafish use spectral information to suppress the visual background

Behavioral and circuit principles of temperature gradient navigation Behavioral thermoregulation is critical for survival across animals. Balakrishnan and Haesemeyer discover that thermoregulatory behavior in larval zebrafish is organized into longer-term swim modes. T...

Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social led by Kaarthik A Balakrishnan: We identify medullary circuits that represent the valence of thermal stimuli and control both long-term strategies of cold-avoidance and short term hot avoidance behaviors to enable thermoregulation. www.cell.com/current-biol...

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity!

We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have:
(1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs)
(2) better hand dexterity
(3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

I am excited to share my PhD work on head-direction cells recorded in the wild, now published in @science.org, where we recorded neurons in bats flying outdoors on an island.

doi.org/10.1126/sci...

With @ray-neuro.bsky.social, Shir Maimon, Liora Las, Nachum Ulanovsky and many others

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

Our review is out 🎉

We discuss how neural computations in the retina shape behavior, continuing the top-down tradition of Lettvin et al.'s classic bug-detector neurons

Check it out 👀 arevie.ws/46HMEjd @annualreviews.bsky.social w/ coauthors @serenariccitelli.bsky.social @annaintegrated.bsky.social

“Blame your parents if you can’t pay enough attention." At least when you are a zebrafish! Our new study on attentional switching together with Kumaresh Krishnan, @paulapflitsch.bsky.social , @zwitscherarmin.bsky.social and Florian Engert is out in Science Advances:
doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Our latest study on the neurobiology of collective behavior is now posted as a preprint, led by UCSD PhD student Jo-Hsien Yu @anitajhyu.bsky.social @ucsandiego.bsky.social @danionella.bsky.social

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

Hierarchical processing of sensory information across topographically organized thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish brain Thalamocortical projections contribute to the spatial organization and functional hierarchies of the mammalian cortex. Primary sensory cortices receive topographically segregated information from firs...

Check out this exciting study led by Anh-Tuan Trinh from our lab, where we investigated how thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish pallium receive, represent, and integrate sensory information:
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Excited to share our latest paper - now out in @science.org - we showed how oxytocin modulates maternally-directed behavior in young mice (P15).