Brad Hulse

How is the nervous system organized to coordinate behavior? To approach this massive question, a team led by @asbates.bsky.social, @jasper-tms.bsky.social, @mindyisminsu.bsky.social, & Helen Yang present the BANC: a Brain and Nerve Cord connectome.

Preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧪#Neuroskyence

New preprint from Yipei Guo and Ann Hermundstad (@hhmijanelia.bsky.social) - a wonderfully in-depth investigation into environmental variability and optimal behavioural strategies.

🪰 A new ‘Eyemap’ developed by a team led by Arthur Zhao & @michaelreiser.bsky.social reveals how visual information detected by the fly’s eye shows up in neurons deep in the brain. Remarkably, the eye’s shape determines how flies see motion.👁️
🔗 hhmi.news/4kSZjou

What does a neural network look like? Maybe like this view of Larissa Heinrich's U-net for organelle segmentation, with edges between layer inputs and outputs.

Want to help build networks like this? Join #HHMIJanelia's new AI initiative as a data engineer:
hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Research Specialist - Tavakoli Lab Primary Work Address: 19700 Helix Drive, Ashburn, VA, 20147 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus is a pio...

🧠 Excited by synapse-level brain mapping? Join us at a world-class institute to build molecular tools based on our new #LICONN work — and push the frontier of #MolecularConnectomics. Let’s decode the brain, one synapse at a time.

hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

Super excited to announce a follow-up to the Janelia 'mechanistic basis of foraging' conference - this time held in Birmingham, UK! Join us from the 3rd - 5th November to discuss all things foraging: uobevents.eventsair.com/the-mechanis...

Our new paper out now in Science explores how neural activity in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) *drifts* over time - and *jumps* at key boundaries - to help organize events in memory.

🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here's a quick summary of what we found 🧵👇

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/N
How do neural dynamics in motor cortex interact with those in subcortical networks to flexibly control movement? I’m beyond thrilled to share our work on this problem, led by Eric Kirk @eric-kirk.bsky.social with help from Kangjia Cai!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Two sets of connecting fly neurons with fine, wispy arbors.

Cleaning up disk space, I found this image I made for someone not long after the release of the #HHMIJanelia #Drosophila hemibrain #connectome in 2020. It shows EPG neurons in pink providing inputs to PFL1 neurons in transparent grey. I'm not sure if the image was ever used.

A flexible hippocampal population code for experience relative to reward - Nature Neuroscience Sosa et al. find that hippocampal neural activity in mice encodes both environmental location and experience relative to rewards, spanning distances far from reward, through parallel and flexible popu...

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I've spent much of my PhD thinking about E/I balance, and our latest preprint represents the culmination of that journey. Huge thanks to @fzenke.bsky.social for guiding me.

Looking forward to your thoughts & comments.

On analogies in vertebrate and insect visual systems - Nature Reviews Neuroscience The visual systems of vertebrates and insects exhibit considerable similarities. In this Review, Tanaka and Portugues discuss these similarities, focusing primarily on recent works in larval zebrafish...

As I transitioned from studying Drosophila to the larval zebrafish, I have been noticing a lot of interesting parallels between their visual systems (esp. tectum vs. lobula), which I feel are not talked about enough. We explored these analogies in depth in our latest review:
tinyurl.com/3hvkhsyk

Hey spinal/ventral nerve cord folks. we’re organizing this cross species “cords” meeting @hhmijanelia.bsky.social . Hurry up and upload your abstracts. As a trainee these were my favorite meetings (small and focused) where I got the most useful feedback. DM in case of any Qs.

Light-microscopy-based connectomic reconstruction of mammalian brain tissue Nature - A technique called LICONN (light-microscopy-based connectomics) allows mapping of brain tissue at synapse level and simultaneous measurement of molecular information, thus enabling...

Light-microscopy-based connectomic reconstruction of mammalian brain tissue rdcu.be/ek8GG Wow! 😍

Cognitive Graphs of Latent Structure in Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex Mental maps of environmental structure enable the flexibility that defines intelligent behavior. We describe a striking internal representation in rat prefrontal cortex that exhibits hallmarks of a wo...

"..rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex develops a highly structured yet compact, scalable representation anchored in states at the start and end of self-organized sequences."

Cognitive Graphs of Latent Structure in Rostral Anterior Cingulate Cortex
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share my PhD paper is out! We studied how motion vision is processed beyond the optic lobes to help flies walk straight. It has been a wonderful collaboration with @michaelreiser.bsky.social, @dddavi.bsky.social and many others not in bluesky!
Paper + digest here: bsky.app/profile/cham...

The tilt illusion arises from an efficient reallocation of neural coding resources at the contextual boundary | PNAS The tilt illusion—a bias in the perceived orientation of a center stimulus induced by an oriented surround—illustrates how context shapes visual pe...

Very happy to see our work finally in print!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

TLDR: Tilt illusion is not a bug, but a feature of a well-designed visual system that maximizes information capacity adaptively based on spatial context. (1/6)

Algorithmic dissection of optic flow memory in larval zebrafish The visual stabilization behavior in the larval zebrafish reflects the history of optic flow experienced in the recent past. This integrative process has gained traction in recent years as a simplifie...

Check out my new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Here I run a bunch of psychophysics experiments to better understand how the larval zebrafish🐟 remember the past optic flow in the context of stabilization behaviors.

AI@MBL: Machine Learning for Microscopy Image Analysis | Marine Biological Laboratory The goal of this course is to familiarize researchers in the life sciences with state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for microscopy image analysis and to introduce them to tools and frameworks th...

How can AI help you to analyze your microscopy images?

Find out at the "Machine Learning for Microscopy Image Analysis" course at the @mblscience.bsky.social in Woods Hole from Aug 22-Sep 6!

Applications are due 🚨 April 30 🚨

Read on for more! 👇

www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

Yay - the extensive review Ansgar Büschges and I wrote on insect motor control and the many things insects can teach us about our own nervous systems just came out in Physiological Reviews @apsphysiology.bsky.social. Check it out - it's free: journals.physiology.org/doi/epdf/10....

Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice - Nature Communications Stereo olfaction involves comparing odor differences between the two nostrils. Here, using neuronal recordings and a behavioral test, the authors demonstrate that blind mice use stereo olfaction to fo...

Excited to share the sequel to our 2022 paper! In this follow-up, we show that the stable head direction (HD) signals we reported in blind mice rely on stereo olfaction—that is, the comparison of odor info. between the two nostrils.

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵highlights below

Stereo olfaction underlies stable coding of head direction in blind mice - Nature Communications Stereo olfaction involves comparing odor differences between the two nostrils. Here, using neuronal recordings and a behavioral test, the authors demonstrate that blind mice use stereo olfaction to fo...

🚨new paper alert
Blind mice use stereo olfaction, comparing smells between nostrils, to maintain a stable sense of direction. Blocking this ability disrupts their internal compass.

Kudos to @kasumbisa.bsky.social! Another cool chapter of the Trenholm-Peyrache collab😉

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you want to feel small and insignificant, stare up at the stars in the sky. If you want to feel how immensely profound, impossibly complex, and just outright improbable your existence is, gaze at the stars in this 1mm^3 cube and realize it's less than a millionth the volume of your own brain.

Inhibitory specificity from a connectomic census of mouse visual cortex - Nature Using volumetric electron microscopy, the authors map and analyze the structure of cortical inhibition with synaptic resolution across a column of visual cortex.

It's been done for a while, accepted almost a year ago, but I'm happy to share that my first analysis of the MICrONs cubic mm dataset is online! nature.com/articles/s41...

FlyVISTA, an integrated machine learning platform for deep phenotyping of sleep in Drosophila A machine learning platform identifies and characterizes the dynamics of microbehaviors during fly sleep.

I am proud to share that our work of 4+ years has finally been published. We wondered if there are distinct behaviors that mark sleep in 🪰, where sleep has been defined as prolonged immobility.
🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🥼 Janelia researchers led by @boazmohar.bsky.social @nspruston.bsky.social @rhodamine110.bsky.social & @svoboda314.bsky.social @alleninstitute.bsky.social have developed a new imaging tool that maps brain-wide changes in neuronal connections. 🧠

🔗 www.janelia.org/news/new-ima...

Connectome-driven neural inventory of a complete visual system - Nature A connectome of the right optic lobe from a male fruitfly is presented together with an extensive collection of genetic drivers matched to a comprehensive neuron-type catalogue.

I know there's a 𝒍𝒐𝒕 going on right now, but I couldn’t be prouder to share this long-incubated labor of love: the complete connectome of the male 𝐷𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝ℎ𝑖𝑙𝑎 optic lobe 🧠🪰
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Phase Precession Relative to Turning Angle in Theta‐Modulated Head Direction Cells Grid and place cells typically fire at progressively earlier phases within each cycle of the theta rhythm as rodents run across their firing fields, a phenomenon known as theta phase precession. Here...

Excited to share our latest paper: “Phase Precession Relative to Turning Angle in Theta-Modulated Head Direction Cells” together with Dr. Eleonora Lomi (co-first author) Prof. @katejj.bsky.social Prof. Anna Mitchell and Prof. @neilburgess10.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1002/hipo...

Research Technician Brandeis University is delighted to announce a career opportunity as a Research Technician in the Grienberger Lab. At Brandeis, we offer a competitive benefits and compensation package which includes ...

My lab's senior tech is heading to grad school 🥳so we @BrandeisNeuro have an opening for a Research Technician. It is an ideal position for someone interested in uncovering how our brains learn within a young and collaborative team. Pls spread the news. brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...