Kelsey Tyssowski

Just channeling Stephen J Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops"

thanks for reading! we only looked at lab-raised populations, but there's a rich natural history literature about climbing in wild deer mice, and wild forest mice are better climbers. hand dexterity is less well studied. urban vs populated, we don't know! but an interesting ? for sure!

same, tbh!

...probably i have too many thoughts for this format! but it's not entirely obvious to me how an increase here relates to expectations from primate evo - other than that RFA CSNs in rodents project to deeper spinal cord lamina than CFA CSNs, so perhaps more CSNs w/ fewer synapses to motor neurons

cingulate cortex (as labeled by the allen) is medial/ventral to M2/RFA, and i haven't looked at the extent to which the pattern within the rostral ctx differs - but i could, and may better answer your ?. my understanding is that RFA is often thought of as a homologue of primate SMA/premotor ctx...

we looked at all of cortex, but only neurons that project to C5-C7ish (b/c we labeled by retrograde AAV inj). we see more CSNs in what the allen atlas labels as M2 and S2, but not M1/S1. here's max intensity proj across cortex of labeled neurons -- just to clarify what i mean w/ area labels...

Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito Understanding how life is adapting to urban environments represents an important challenge in evolutionary biology. In this work, we investigate a widely cited example of urban adaptation, Culex pipie...

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities?

Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation.

🧵(1/n)
@science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

there are more CSNs in RFA specifically! (we’re calling RFA m2 here). I don’t have a definitive answer on other spinal proj neurons (but preliminarily, i don’t think there’s a decrease). def very open to any feedback you have after reading!

Thank you!!

...which means that they don't completely diverge. but it's complicated. you could get a genetic change that stops them from mating with one another. natural selection is not entirely predictable.

thank you! the question of "what is a species?" in these kinds of closely related populations is a bit hard to answer. but one thing we know is that there is some crossover between these populations in the wild, causing "gene flow", i.e., sharing of genetic info, between populations...

thanks for sharing!! i think it's possible spinal cord and other brain regions could also show evolved variation and work with ctx to support this behavior...imo, it's an interesting question how different parts of the nervous system evolve together/not to result in behavioral variation!

thanks!!

Hahaha love it!!

thank you!

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thank you!!

general body size is similar, but there are some morphological differences. most notably longer tails in forest mice. tail length doesn't correlate with climbing in our assay (in F2s), but long tails are common in forest animals, so it likely is important for some kinds of climbing

thanks!

thank you!!

thanks!

thank you!!

thank youuuu

thanks, Tommy!

thank you!

thanks! the whole brain is not measurably larger! there are not that many CSNs, though, relative to total cell number in the brain -- so we don't expect an increase in brain size just from this

thank you!!

wow!! i got a fire elmo!! 🧡

thanks! feedback welcome!

thank you!!