Raphael Brito

Astrocytes enable amygdala neural representations supporting memory - Nature Astrocytes in the basolateral amygdala dynamically track fear state and support fear memory retrieval and extinction.

Really nice work from the Holmes lab looking at amygdala astrocytes in fear memory and extinction!

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

Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals Nature Neuroscience - Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping...

⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉
Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience.

Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound!
Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8

I’m pleased to share our new paper, “Hippocampal ripple diversity organizes neuronal reactivation dynamics in the offline brain”, out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

With @vitorlds.bsky.social and David Dupret, we show that diversity in ripple current profiles shapes reactivation dynamics

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🚨 New preprint! 🚨

Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇

📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩

#neuroskyence

Allothetic and idiothetic spatial cues control the multiplexed theta phase coding of place cells - Nature Neuroscience Using a virtual reality apparatus in rats that dissociates external landmarks from self-motion cues, the authors describe how the two modes of theta phase coding in the hippocampus during navigation a...

Allothetic and idiothetic spatial cues control the multiplexed theta phase coding of place cells

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

Cooperative actions of interneuron families support the hippocampal spatial code Identifying the computational roles of different neuron families is crucial for understanding neural networks. Most neural diversity is embodied in various types of γ-aminobutyric acid–mediated (GABAe...

Cool new findings on interneurons and spatial coding. Nice!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our new preprint on the brain-wide organization of intrinsic timescales at single neuron resolution. Work w/ @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, Anna Levina, @engeltatiana.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧠 Are you an early-career brain science researcher interested to attend #FENS2026 in Barcelona, Europe’s largest #neuroscience meeting? Apply for the ALBA-CHS Travel Awards!

✈️ Tiered grants for EU & non-EU candidates
✅ Final-year PhD/MD or ≤10 years post-PhD/MD
👉🏽 loom.ly/7FOgCJc
📆 21 Oct 2025

Thanks, that explains a lot of things!

Could it be that photometry averages two different populations, one that is responding to reward onset, one that increase at CS+ time? (Somehow remind me of this paper pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...) Or did I just misread the old papers?

Very cool data! Congrats! I have so many questions!
First one that pop to my mind: I'm suprised to see that DA and GABA neurons keep firing at the reward time, even during 'late' phase. My understanding of classical Schultz results were that the response to reward faded away with learning?

Very excited to share this major update to our paper delineating VTA GABA neuron encoding of valence and decision conflict. Studies led by the amazing @margestelzner.bsky.social. We leaned in here, taking the opportunity to add a lot of cool new data. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Corticotropin-releasing hormone modulates NREM sleep consolidation through the thalamic reticular nucleus Nature Communications - Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), known for activating the HPA axis during stress, also acts centrally in the brain. Here, the authors show that CRH modulates thalamic...

Happy to announce our new paper in Nature Communications: rdcu.be/eBpGY
We show how CRH in the thalamic reticular nucleus modulates NREM sleep, helping to understand how stress impacts sleep

Congrats to Loredana Cumpana and team, in work led by Simone Astori!
@epfl-brainmind.bsky.social‬

Ps: Does anyone know of a project to translate this in French?
I have a lot of relatives that could be very interested, but don't necessarily have the English fluency to grasp everything.
I'd be happy to help!

The authors that I found on bluesky:
@lewan.bsky.social @karmaos.bsky.social @noupside.bsky.social @karmaos.bsky.social @philippmarkolin.bsky.social @chrischirp.bsky.social @johnfocook.bsky.social
Thanks for the great work !

In these dark times for Science and Democracy, it's alleviating and refreshing to read solution-driven, high-quality academic work on the subject of Democratic Backsliding.

zenodo.org/records/1569...

"The lack of full-bodied locomotion and extensive exploratory behaviors in head-fixed paradigms indicates that in our experimental setup the behavioral state is not directly analogous to the preparatory and consummatory phases seen in freely moving tasks."

Observational activation of anterior cingulate cortical neurons coordinates hippocampal replay in social learning Social learning enables a subject to make decisions by observing the actions of another. How neural circuits acquire relevant information during observation to guide subsequent behavior is unknown. Ut...

Mirror neurons making a comeback?

Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal - Nature Place cells in the chickadee hippocampus coherently represent locations in space, whether physically visited or viewed, enabling spatial reasoning at a distance through a unified process coordinated b...

Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal www.nature.com/articles/s41... - very cool study with chickadees!

Connectomic reconstruction from hippocampal CA3 reveals spatially graded mossy fiber inputs and selective feedforward inhibition to pyramidal cells The mossy fiber (MF) connections to pyramidal cells in hippocampal CA3 are hypothesized to participate in pattern separation and memory encoding, yet no large–scale neuronal wiring diagram exists for ...

Really beautiful hippocampal connectomics from @zhihaozheng.bsky.social et al. Such high quality data shows many interesting circuit wiring surprises - an incredible resource to digest! Great also to see the parallels with our physiology work on neuronal heterogeneity
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Representation of sex-specific social memory in ventral CA1 neurons Recognizing familiar individuals is crucial for adaptive social interactions among animals. However, the multidimensional nature of social memory encompassing sexual information remains unelucidated. ...

I haven't seen this one pop in my feed but I find it super interestingl!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very impressive work!

Discrete spatiotemporal encoding of striatal dopamine transmission Dopamine (DA) transmission critically regulates diverse, basal ganglia–dependent behaviors by activating distinct subtypes of G protein–coupled receptors. Spatially broad DA release has been extensive...

Very cool work from Chris Ford's group out in @science.org

Nicotine engages a VTA-NAc feedback loop to inhibit amygdala-projecting dopamine neurons and induce anxiety-like behaviors - Nature Communications Drugs of abuse exert both motivational and emotional effects. Here, the authors show that nicotine and ethanol activate a VTA–NAc loop that inhibits dopamine neurons projecting to the amygdala, thereb...

Nicotine doesn’t just “turn on” the brain’s reward circuits — it reshapes them. Our new paper in Nature Communications shows that activating reward-linked dopamine neurons also sets off a feedback loop that drives negative emotional states.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sex‐Specific Adaptations to VTA Circuits Following Subchronic Stress Subchronic variable stress, a paradigm shown to have divergent behavioral effects in males and females, induces shared and distinct physiological adaptations in the VTA. While both males and females ...

New work from my lab looking at how dopamine neurons are affected by stress and males and females! This paper comes to you through three rounds of major building construction, a pandemic, six months that we could not get TTX, some animal facility shenanigans and now is here on your internet!

Don’t miss our latest 📝 with @chrislisgaras.bsky.social & Rick Staba on high-frequency oscillations in preclinical 🧠 disease models, with guidelines for recording, detection and analysis. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Dopaminergic action prediction errors serve as a value-free teaching signal - Nature Dopaminergic action prediction error signals are used by mice as a value-free teaching signal to reinforce stable sound–action associations in the tail of the striatum.

Impressive study in @nature from my colleague Marcus Stephenson-Jones at UCL in the @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social

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

We are hiring! — Semantic memory Lab

We are hiring! PostDoc position on my ERC for wire-less electrophysiology in our 9mX5m rat HexMaze! Experience with tetrodes or silicone probes required. Contact me for questions! www.genzellab.com/we-are-hiring

Impressive study involving direct hippocampal recordings from patients:

Independent Continuous Tracking of Multiple Agents in the Human Hippocampus

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

Thrilled to share our state-of-the-art method for in vivo cell-type classification and brain region localization, NEMO, which is now now a spotlight at @iclr-conf.bsky.social !

We use NEMO to characterize the electrophysiological diversity of cell-types across the entire mouse brain. 🐭 🧪 🧠