Sihao Lu

Astrocytes and neurons encode natural stimuli with partially shared but distinct composite receptive fields Astrocytes are increasingly recognized as active participants in sensory processing, but whether they show selective responses to stimulus features, analogous to neuronal receptive fields, is not yet ...

Some of the work I did for my PhD finally on biorxiv! We study calcium responses of astrocytes and neurons in vivo in response to ultrasonic vocalisations

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

Researchers keep a mammalian cochlea alive outside the body for the first time - News The technological breakthrough may improve our understanding of the cellular mechanisms behind hearing loss.

Shortly before his death last month, James Hudspeth and his team achieved a groundbreaking technological advancement: the ability to keep a tiny sliver of the cochlea alive and functional outside of the body for the first time. #RockefellerScience

Transcriptional Interference Gates Monogenic Odorant Receptor Expression in Ants Communication is crucial to social life, and in ants, it is mediated primarily through olfaction. Ants have more odorant receptor (OR) genes than any other group of insects, generated through tandem d...

Ants 🐜 coordinate their societies through smell 👃. They carry more odorant receptor genes than any other insect 🧬, yet each olfactory neuron must somehow select and express just one.

My brilliant former student Giacomo Glotzer and colleagues have discovered how:

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

It has been a great privilege to have worked with Jim. A truly inspiring individual who embodied a level of kindness, curiosity, and wisdom we should all aspire to.

Axonal defasciculation is restricted to specific branching points during regeneration of the lateral line nerve in zebrafish https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.23.666336v1

Amplification through local critical behavior in the mammalian cochlea | PNAS Hearing hinges upon the ear’s ability to enhance its responsiveness by means of an energy-expending active process that amplifies the very mechanic...

We took the #ear ’s in-built amplifier out of the body, watched it work live, and saw that it runs near a state of #criticality, a knife-edge balance that lets us hear from whispers to thunderclaps and up to 20 kHz. Birds, reptiles, and insects exploit the same physics. #Biophysics shorturl.at/AkMz9

Remember seeing his talk in Kyoto last year, very cool stuff! Congrats!

YouTube video by Pacific Optica Ventana Wide two-photon calcium imaging

youtu.be/9zpWEOJWuD0?... Ventana imaging. The best 2p system. Fast, high rez, 3+ mm field-of-view. pacificoptica.com/ventana/ Turnkey systems, or parts.

Had a great time working with Nico on this!

Checkout this Journal of Neurophysiology podcast where Andriy, Johnny and John talk about our work generating natural mouse vocalisations using generative adversarial networks:
www.podbean.com/ew/pb-xawkr-...

Bidirectional generative adversarial representation learning for natural stimulus synthesis | Journal of Neurophysiology Thousands of species use vocal signals to communicate with one another. Vocalizations carry rich information, yet characterizing and analyzing these complex, high-dimensional signals is difficult and ...

Super proud of both Johnny and John, they demonstrate a generative model for synthesising natural mouse vocalisations and show that these artificially generated vocalisations can be used to probe receptive field properties of neurons in real mice!
journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Composite receptive fields in the mouse auditory cortex Abstract figure legend We investigated how auditory cortical neurons in mice represent complex natural stimuli by presenting them with mouse ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs) and pitch-shifted starling...

Just repopulating the profile with some old stuff.
My first ever paper; showing composite receptive fields in mouse auditory cortex in vivo. Great pleasure working on this as part of my PhD with Andriy Kozlov and others!
physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/...