Butt Lab - Oxford

Quite the faff, 2 amazing PDRAs and a crazy good PhD student. Still, made writing the limitations section quite easy 😉. I hope all is well with you Mick!

A deep learning pipeline for accurate and automated restoration, segmentation, and quantification of dendritic spines Garcia et al. present RESPAN, a pipeline that enables automated dendritic spine analysis through seamless integration of deep learning image restoration and segmentation capabilities with comprehensiv...

Excited to highlight a new paper from my graduate student Sergio Bernal Garcia who, together withLuke Hammond, developed RESPAN, a new deep-learning pipeline automating the segmentation of neuronal morphology and dendritic spines from fluorescent microscopy images:
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Great credit must go to the team Filippo, Liad, and the rest of the gang for persevering and demonstrating that (mainly SST) interneurons contribute to the formative activity that sculpts and creates the circuits that underpin our conscious thoughts. Thanks also to our funders @ukri.org!

GABAergic circuits reflect different requirements for sensory integration in postnatal mouse neocortex Information transfer in mammalian cerebral cortex is dependent on GABAergic interneuron circuits that are widely assumed to be uniform across the neoc…

A rather 'unique' paper from our lab is online in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social now. Unique in the sense that I don't think anyone else will be rushing to optotag cortical interneurons in the early postnatal brain... because it is nigh on impossible!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Two faculty positions in my department this year. Please spread the word! And don't hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more.

Many thanks to all the team and our collaborators but especially Gabriel Ocana-Santero for his amazing in vivo imaging and Hannah Warming for her patching skills. The work was funded by grants from @ukri.org and @erc.europa.eu

Perinatal serotonin signalling dynamically influences the development of cortical GABAergic circuits with consequences for lifelong sensory encoding Nature Communications - Ocana-Santero and colleagues show that serotonin is a key regulator of sensory programming. Early life SSRI exposure alters the developmental trajectory of interneurons to...

Increasing 5-HT during this time through genetic, pharmacological (SSRIs) or adverse stimuli results in an altered trajectory for the development of GABAergic interneurons, impacting early activity and – in the case of SSRIs – that present through to adulthood.

The article is here: rdcu.be/epHXV

Image of a coronal section through postnatal mouse somatosensory cortex (S1BF with transient expression of the serotonin transporter in thalamic afferents shown in red.

Our study on the impact of altered serotonin (5-HT) signalling on the developing sensory cortex is now live at Nature Comms.

We use longitudinal in vivo imaging of 5-HT and neural activity to show that this neuromodulator is buffered in early life to promote bottom-up instruction of sensory areas.

Save the date!

We're organising a workshop on Data Sharing on the 10th of February at Guy's Campus (KCL)! All you need to know to make your datasets open to the public + engaging in open science practices.

More details to come soon — stay tuned!

Congratulations to Gabriel! @interneuron.bsky.social

Well done Ivan! @interneuron.bsky.social

For sure! Although my feeling is that Mother Nature always finds a way to (a proximity of) normal.

This sounds interesting... definitely one to check out.

Thank you so much Zoltan @zoltan-molnar.bsky.social and Gilad for being such wonderful examiners! The perfect academic end to the calendar year

Thanks @nkourdougli.bsky.social

Fast-spike interneurons in visual cortical layer 5: Heterogeneous response properties are related to thalamocortical connectivity Layer 4 of rabbit V1 contains fast-spiking GABAergic interneurons (suspected inhibitory interneurons, SINs) that receive potent synaptic input from the LGN and generate fast, local feed-forward inhibi...

Fast-spike interneurons in visual cortical layer 5: Heterogeneous response properties are related to thalamocortical connectivity

Some L5 INT with strong input from LGN and visual responses more similar to L4 INT than those receiving little direct LGN input.

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Perinatal serotonin signalling dynamically influences the development of cortical GABAergic circuits with consequences for lifelong sensory encoding Serotonin plays a prominent role in neurodevelopment, regulating processes from cell division to synaptic connectivity. Clinical studies suggest that alterations in serotonin signalling such as geneti...

I’m might be biased but we’re getting there with tracking circuits over development and into adulthood (in mice). Some interesting commonalities/pathways emerging

biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

We did this. Beautiful work from the 🦋less Gabriel Ocana-Santero & team. More to follow soon but state-dependent neuromodulation is coming to developmental neuroscience in a big way 🧠🧪

Neuroscience methods - YouTube Nanocourse: Approaches to Study Neural Circuits This course was taught by Anita Autry, Tiago Gonçalves, and Luke Sjulson at Albert Einstein College of Medici...

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube!

Please like and repost to help us get the word out!

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition
Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization
🧵

A toolbox for ablating excitatory and inhibitory synapses

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Our 2nd new Doctor in as many days! Many congratulations to Gabi on the successful defence of his thesis (in vivo 5-HT in neurodevelopment; preprint out soon!). Huge thanks to the 🦋less, elite examining team of Oscar Marin & Colin Akerman, also co-PI Trevor Sharp and Serotonin & Beyond @ec.europa.eu

NEW DOCTOR from the lab, Antara Majumdar🥳 🍾 thanks to @kerrywalker.bsky.social @jpassecker.bsky.social for examination & 2nd supervisor @interneuron.bsky.social. Here is Antara's preprint, came out right around the US election and X being deserted: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

More Than a Small Brain: The Importance of Studying Neural Function during Development The nervous system contains complex circuits comprising thousands of cell types and trillions of connections. Here, we discuss how the field of “developmental systems neuroscience” combines the molecu...

Looking for an escape over the holiday?
@meikeesther.bsky.social and I published a ViewPoint looking at the intersection of Developmental and Systems Neuroscience titled “More Than a Small Brain: The Importance of Studying Neural Function during Development”

www.jneurosci.org/content/44/4...

A huge pleasure to repost this announcement - over 40 students have graduated from our fantastic @sussexneuro.bsky.social PhD programme, and each year brings new perspectives and opportunities for both the new joiners and ourselves as their hosts. Do consider applying!

Doctoral (PhD) student position in Cognitive Neuroscience Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? To be a doctoral student means to devote oneself to a research project under supervision of experienced researchers and following an individu

We are recruiting a PhD student at the Brain, Body, and Self Lab, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. Learn more and apply here: kidoktorand.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Neuroscientists! A key message from the ALBA Network
Please help us spread the word and share this with your network!!!
Nominate (self-n allowed) a mid-career neuroscientist (5+ years post-PhD) for the ALBA-Roche Research Prize for Excellence in Neuroscience!
🔎http://loom.ly/_EvQvm4
🗓️20 January 2025

go.bsky.app/43wgshX

The claustrum is critical for maintaining working memory information Working memory (WM) enables the mammalian brain to temporarily store and manipulate information, supporting cognitive tasks and communication processes. Rather than depending on a single specialized a...

Dive into our latest findings on this powerful structure here: “The claustrum is critical for maintaining working memory” biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

**We are recruiting**

Seeking a postdoc to work on a Wellcome-funded cohort study focusing on social-cognitive processing in typically developing children and adolescents (aged 8-18 years) and children and adolescents with 22q11.1 deletion syndrome.

www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/49291/