Liz Ronan, PhD

Very grateful to @byneuron.bsky.social for his unwavering support and mentorship with many project ideas over the years (beginning as a rotation student in my first year of grad school!) 🥹

Beautiful new work by @manduh21.bsky.social and our team! Clumsy, a kainate-type glutamate receptor, mediates noxious cold sensation and cold behavioral avoidance in fruit flies. This expands our prior work demonstrating this class of receptors also functions as a cold receptor in worms and mammals.

Ultrasonic signals support a large-scale communication landscape in wild mice. 👇 New paper by the ENES Bioacoustics Research Team in @currentbiology.bsky.social

authors.elsevier.com/a/1llMH3QW8S...

Proud to share this work, which we spearheaded as a team with several early-career scientists (including myself and the brilliant @manduh21.bsky.social )🌱

Grateful to @byneuron.bsky.social for continued mentoring & encouraging us to harness LabGym’s abilities across model organisms!

We developed LabGym models capable of automatic quantification of key worm behaviors:

🪱 Forward vs. reverse locomotion
🪱 Omega bends & overlapping postures
🪱 Multi-worm tracking
🪱 Quantifying behavior across lifespan

Our approach can be customized by users to include other behaviors of interest.

New preprint with @manduh21.bsky.social ! 🎉 We introduce LabGym, an open-source AI platform for analyzing C. elegans behavior.🪱

LabGym makes worm behavior analysis accurate, customizable, and accessible, no coding or costly setup required.

Can you add me? Thanks!

Intradental mechano-nociceptors serve as sentinels that prevent tooth damage Ronan et al. explore the function of trigeminal sensory neurons innervating the inner tooth—herein, intradental neurons. They determine these specialized cells respond to damage of the enamel and init...

LabGym has been used in reseach across many labs. The latest example is this excellent study from
@jjemrick.bsky.social lab. cell.com/cell-reports...
@cp-cellreports.bsky.social @elizabithian.bsky.social

Register to attend the virtual 2025 LabGym Symposium! LabGym is a powerful and customizable AI-based tool enabling automated quantification of behavior (+ more!)

Trump Administration Scraps Effort to Pause Health-Research Funding The administration halted and then restarted billions in new research grants flowing from the National Institutes of Health.

Really interesting (ha ha i can't stand this roller coaster) back and forth on NIH funding. 9 Senate Republicans sent a letter warning Vought not to hold NIH funds. Vought tries to hold NIH funds. He loses. [though still lots of budget shenanigans] www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

This “administration” acts like it’s playing musical chairs with people’s lives.

Well, none of us may ever get funded again but in the meantime, here's some new science!

Led by recent PhD Anjali Pandey w/ex-UG Maya Katz. Here we identify an asymmetric molecular mechanism that underlies symmetric context-dependent sensory plasticity in the AWC olfactory neuron pair in C. elegans

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

This is a catastrophe. There is nothing else to be said.

Check out our first research article from the Emrick lab, published in Cell Reports! We define the sensory neurons in the tooth as sentinels: tuned to detect tooth damage and trigger a protective jaw opening reflex. 🦷🔨

I’m officially a mammalian somatosensory biologist (but I still 🩷 worms 🪱)

Official paper thread coming soon… this work represents a major career milestone for many of the authors 🥹

I couldn’t be prouder to work with such an inspiring team to bring this project to the finish line! 💙💛

🫶 didn’t expect it to feel so healing. very grateful to be a part of it.

C. elegans, ba ba ba. #Worm25

Humming this as I sadly pack my luggage to leave 🥲

A laureate and a trend setter #worm25

We’ve tried to look into the sound frequencies of rustling leaves etc to see if worm crawling could elicit detectable frequencies🤔

Proud moment witnessing our very own talented graduate student Xu Bai present the lab’s most recent work in C elegans auditory sensation!

C elegans can sense sound AND serve as a genetic model for an understudied form of human hearing loss! As the moderator mentioned- what CAN’T worms do?? 🤩 🪱 #worm25

Worm meeting bucketlist:
✅ Photo with Nobel laureate (and @manduh21.bsky.social)

Thank you Dr. Ambros, for spending time with early stage scientists!

I love this community 🪱 #Worm25

Day 4 of #Worm25: 15k+ steps/daily, sweating through 95°F+ Cali heat, followed by shivering in AC, all while being immersed in the latest C. elegans research.

Is this a genetics conference or a worm-themed detox?

“Do you have any advice for aspiring young scientists?”

“Do genetics.” *mic drop*

#worm25

Go worms! #worm25

The forgotten half of scientific thinking | PNAS The forgotten half of scientific thinking

“The idea that taking walks, reading things unrelated to your research, and hanging out with strangers in a campus pub should be considered part of the serious process of thinking, but might well meet with skepticism in practice.”

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

As it’s my first time joining Worm Meeting, I was excited to participate in Worm Art show as well.
This year’s topic is resilience. In times of scarcity, worms gather holding one another to reach new grounds. Alone - they are fragile, together - they rise. Even the sky yields in unity. #worm25

🙏 thank you!!!

".....but a key feature of this community became abundantly clear: Worm people tend to help one other. They readily share insights, lab processes, even worms themselves."

So true. The worm community is the best.