Joseph D. Zak

Chicago is definitely burning. Just not in the way the news wants to portray.

Beyond Wolbachia—Can a small molecule control insect reproduction? Kaur et al. demonstrate reduced histone acetylation as a key mechanism underpinning Wolbachia’s paternal-effect embryonic lethality trait in Drosophila melanogaster. Recapitulation of this trait by in...

#Wolbachia has puzzled scientists with its power to rewire insect reproduction. What if I tell you that we found one of the keys Wolbachia use to rewire its host AND a small molecule inhibitor uses this key to mimic what this microbe has mastered for millions of years.

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Very excited to see this out in the world. It was fun to play a (small) part in it.

Octopuses sense environmental microbiomes to drive predatory and parental behaviors. Artwork by Lily Soucy. #evolution #sensation #microbiome @cellpress.bsky.social

Excited to share our latest!! Thanks to everyone involved especially @neurovenki.bsky.social!

Mice navigate scent trails using predictive policies Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

Proud to share Kai Clane Belonio’s latest work in our lab. Kai showed that induced-depression decreases behavioral tolerance of aversive odorants as well as increases in neuroinflammation in sensory affective areas. Also contributing are @nervenkidd.bsky.social and Eyerusalem Haile.

🚨Very happy that my PhD work is now out in @nature.com!

We discovered that evolution, by acting in the midbrain, shifted the threshold to escape in Peromyscus mice, to fine-tune defensive strategies in different environments

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

This was a truly collaborative effort! 🧵⬇️

Some campus brutalism to accompany this brutal heatwave.

Good thought, but I don’t know for sure about lipofuscin. I’m not surprised in the least that you see them at 8w. They can be apparent even in juveniles.

These are super common especially in the glomerular layer. Tons of autofluorescent accumulation in both red and green. They are aggregations of some sort and often increase with the age of the animal. I assume they are extracellular plaques.

Going green: Recycling transcriptomes to infer evolutionary relationships, gene duplication, gene tree conflict, and patterns of molecular evolution in the Apocynaceae Background and Aims: The flowering plant family Apocynaceae exhibits diverse adaptations with biological and pharmaceutical significance, many of which have been studied with RNA-seq. However, despite...

@shawn-anthony.bsky.social helped ~20 undergrads learn transcriptomics in this budget friendly investigation into the dogbane family. A fun way to investigate the molecular evolution of the group. Also, a chance to collaborate with @phylonatworks.bsky.social and Jarrad! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

That lab space looks awfully familiar 🤔

Decoding olfactory bulb output: A behavioral assessment of rate, synchrony, and respiratory phase coding Neurogenetics; Behavioral neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience

Animals’ sniffing drives rhythmic input to the olfactory system.

How does this timing contribute to perception, especially beyond first steps of olfactory processing?

We tested this using simple closed-loop optogenetics in our new paper: www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

Congrats, Paul! This is fantastic!

What a special place. So grateful for all the friendships, learning, and science that fullfilled my time @harvard.edu.

Proud of @nervenkidd.bsky.social (Zach Fyke), a graduate student in our group, for being recognized by @uicbios.bsky.social for both his research AND teaching over the past academic year.

Here are links to some of his recent work:

tinyurl.com/37vw5s5f

tinyurl.com/23zu458t

tinyurl.com/3mmjvw83

Congrats, Rachel! Well-deserved.

A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain Although topographical maps organize many peripheral sensory systems, it remains unclear whether olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) choose which of the ~1100 odor receptors (ORs) to express based upon t...

Maps are everywhere in the brain...and finally we've discovered one in the nose! Led by @davidhbrann.bsky.social, we uncovered the logic that specifies the positions of each of the 1,000 sensory neuron subtypes in the nose and aligns their projections to the brain.👇👃see more details below👃👇

One of our new favorite images for #fluoresencefriday. Graduate student, Lindsay Vivona, labeled fibers from each anterior olfactory nucleus hemisphere as they bidirectionally pass through the anterior commissure. #neuroskyence #olfaction

This NOFO seems to active: grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

#preprint:

We mapped the structure and function of olfactory bulb circuits with in vivo 2-photon microscopy and synchrotron #Xray holographic nanotomography.

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

@yuxinzhang.bsky.social @andreas-t-schaefer.bsky.social @apacureanu.bsky.social
@crick.ac.uk @esrf.fr

Amplification of Olfactory Transduction Currents Implements Sparse Stimulus Encoding Sensory systems must perform the dual and opposing tasks of being sensitive to weak stimuli while also maintaining information content in dense and variable sensory landscapes. This occurs in the olfa...

Now in its final form, our recent work on how olfactory transduction currents help ensure sparse sensory coding. Led by a post-bac Kai Clane Belonio and a graduate student, Eyerusalem Haile, this was a group effort by the entire laboratory.

www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1...

My lab has several postdoctoral fellow and software engineering positions available. Please email me if you’re interested.

Smell studies often use unnaturally high odor concentrations, analysis reveals It’s time to fashion olfactory neuroscience stimuli based on odor concentrations in the wild, say study investigators Elizabeth Hong and Matt Wachowiak.

Olfactory neuroscientists have known for a while that their stimuli stink. A new analysis illuminates the extent of the problem.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sm...

Ca2+-Activated Ion Channels Exert Opposite Effects in Different Signaling Compartments of Vomeronasal Sensory Neurons In most mammals, conspecific chemical cues that drive innate social and sexual behavior are detected by the vomeronasal organ (VNO) and processed in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). Chemosensory st...

Now out in @sfnjournals.bsky.socialjournals.bsky.social : bit.ly/3YzVjRv. In VSNs, Ca²⁺ doesn’t tell a 'simple' story. Ca²⁺ at the knob excites, while at the soma it can activate K⁺ channels, dampening excitability. This channel diversity and compartmentalization refine vomeronasal sensory output-

Thanks, Izumi!

Commute home

The cingulate cortex facilitates auditory perception under challenging listening conditions | PNAS We often exert greater cognitive resources (i.e., listening effort) to understand speech under challenging acoustic conditions. This mechanism can ...

Excited to share my latest work just out in @pnas.org! This NIH MOSAIC K99-funded project identifies a top-down cortical circuit—from cingulate to auditory cortex—that supports auditory perceptual performance in challenging listening conditions: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🚨 Job alert! 🚨
The Chung Lab @ Yale seeks a motivated, creative postdoc to examine tissue remodeling in health and disease. We study ovarian aging and cardiovascular disease in human samples and animal models. Passionate about single-cell, spatial genomics, machine learning & therapeutics? Join us!