Nazim Kourdougli

🔬🧠 Releasing the 1.0 version of #Suite2p and THE PAPER w/ @marius10p.bsky.social! Now with GPU acceleration. Want to use Suite2p but don’t have 100,000 neuron recordings? We show you how to get those with a standard 2p microscope #neuroscience #imaging #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Innate development of cognitive functions and motor programs by chemoaffinity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.30.702840v1

Here is a news story from York University about our new Nature paper
www.yorku.ca/news/2025/10...

Do inhibitory interneurons encode information or just keep the rhythm? Inhibitory interneurons may help encode the brain’s internal representation of space

There's a very cool Buzsaki #neuroskyence paper out in Science this week, looking at hippocampal spatial information encoding by multiple interneuron subtypes in parallel. The brilliant @agonru.bsky.social and I wrote a wee perspective to go alongside it: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Multiple autism genes influence GABA neuron remodeling via distinct developmental trajectories Abstract. Variation in over 100 genes are now associated with increased risk for autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions, but how this variation r

Do you like neuronal #plasticity? #genetics? #Celegans? Check out 1st installment of work by Kristi Zoga in the lab. Kristi screened 20 conserved #autism genes for roles in experience-dependent #neuron remodeling and a related behavior.
doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyaf156

Title page of preprint

SCN2A is a top risk gene for autism. But how does losing one copy of it affect dendritic function during flexible decision-making? 🧬🐭🧠🧪

Our study in preprint @biorxivpreprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Supported by a @simonsfoundation.org SFARI Pilot Award 🙌
#SCN2A #cureSCN2A

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature!

When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️

The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar

bit.ly/3HvWSum

A reduced ability to discriminate social from non-social touch at the circuit level may underlie social avoidance in autism - Nature Communications Some autistic individuals experience aversion to social touch. Authors use Neuropixels probes and demonstrate that unlike wild type mice, Fmr1 knockout mice find social and non-social interactions equ...

A tour de force by Trishala Chari, PhD in C.
Portera-Cailliau lab dissecting social touch brain circuitry in autism using neuropixels recordings in S1-Striatum-BLA! Now published in @natcomms.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Benchmarking cerebellar organoids to model autism spectrum disorder and human brain evolution While cortical organoids have been used to model different facets of neurodevelopmental conditions and human brain evolution, cerebellar organoids have not yet featured so prominently in the same cont...

New preprint alert 📣
#Cerebellum, organoid, autism & brain evolution 🧪 🧫🧠🧬
Collaboration with G. Testa; fruit of years of work by smart students, led by postdoc Davide Aprile. Organoids to understand better the developmental basis of autism (focus: CHD8) & sapiens brain evolution (focus: CADPS2) 🧵

Distinct synaptic plasticity rules operate across dendritic compartments in vivo during learning Synaptic plasticity underlies learning by modifying specific synaptic inputs to reshape neural activity and behavior. However, the rules governing which synapses will undergo different forms of plasti...

Multiple learning rules in different parts of dendrites.

Definitive goodbye to hoping the brain is simple...?? 😯
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

A multi-institutional investigation of psilocybin's effects on mouse behavior Studies reporting novel therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs are rapidly emerging. However, the reproducibility and reliability of these findings could remain uncertain for years. Here, we impleme...

A much-needed joint effort from five labs to see which behavioral effects of psilocybin in mice are reliable, and which may be spurious 🐁🍄

@theborislab.bsky.social @mazenkheirbek.bsky.social @indigenerd.bsky.social Vikaas Sohal and Stephan Lammel 👏

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

How does early life adversity impact white matter brain connections and subsequent cognitive abilities?

Adversity was associated with lower white matter integrity and later difficulty with arithmetic & receptive language yet interpersonal resilience was protective.

www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

Psilocybin’s lasting action requires pyramidal cell types and 5-HT2A receptors - Nature A pyramidal cell type and the 5-HT2A receptor in the medial frontal cortex have essential roles in psilocybin’s long-term drug action.

Our latest study identifies a specific cell type and receptor essential for psilocybin’s long-lasting neural and behavioral effects 🍄🔬🧠🧪

Led by Ling-Xiao Shao and @ItsClaraLiao

Funded by @NIH @NIMHgov

📄 Read in @nature.com - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Molecular and cellular dynamics of the developing human neocortex | Nature The development of the human neocortex is highly dynamic, involving complex cellular trajectories controlled by gene regulation1. Here we collected paired single-nucleus chromatin accessibility and transcriptome data from 38 human neocortical samples encompassing both the prefrontal cortex and the primary visual cortex. These samples span five main developmental stages, ranging from the first trimester to adolescence. In parallel, we performed spatial transcriptomic analysis on a subset of the samples to illustrate spatial organization and intercellular communication. This atlas enables us to catalogue cell-type-specific, age-specific and area-specific gene regulatory networks underlying neural differentiation. Moreover, combining single-cell profiling, progenitor purification and lineage-tracing experiments, we have untangled the complex lineage relationships among progenitor subtypes during the neurogenesis-to-gliogenesis transition. We identified a tripotential intermediate progenit

Study decodes human neocortex dynamics: 38 samples from 5 stages, 2 regions. 1st trimester to adolescence insights. #Neuroscience PMID:39779846, Nature 2025, @Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08351-7 #Medsky #Pharmsky #RNA 🧪

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... - really pleased that this paper with Henry Potter is now published in the European Journal of Neuroscience 😊

Synaptic-dependent developmental dysconnectivity in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome Synaptic dysfunction underlies brain connectivity alterations in 22q11DS, a syndrome linked to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Our latest cross-species 🐭👨 work is out today
▶️ science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We show that
1️⃣ Brain connectivity in carriers of genetic alterations conferring high risk for #autism & #schizophrenia U-turns (hyper▶️ hypo) during adolescence
2️⃣ This switch is driven by synaptic remodeling

Thread 🧵👇 1/n

A subcortical switchboard for perseverative, exploratory and disengaged states - Nature Behavioural experiments in mice demonstrate that GABAergic (γ-aminobutyric acid-expressing), glutamatergic and serotonergic neurons in the median raphe nucleus have distinct and complementary function...

Should you stick to your goal, try something else, or give up? Your median raphe nucleus in the brainstem knows and will decide for you 😉. First foray of my lab into foraging, behavioural strategies and exploration. Amazing work from the one and only Mehran Ahmadlou: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lateral inhibition in V1 controls neural and perceptual contrast sensitivity - Nature Neuroscience The role of lateral inhibition for perception and neural computation remains unsolved. Del Rosario et al. show that distinct types of cortical interneurons in V1 drive lateral inhibition that causes s...

(1/10) Happy to share a science update! 🧠🧪
Our @natureneuro.bsky.social article shows how inhibitory neurons calculate “subtraction” or “division” to adjust visual sensitivity!
This one has it all – behavior, optogenetics, modeling, cell types, subthreshold mechanisms. Quick thread 🧵below

Brain-wide presynaptic networks of functionally distinct cortical neurons - Nature Behavioural-state-dependent pyramidal neurons have a distinct pattern of long-range glutamatergic inputs, with a larger proportion of thalamic versus motor cortex inputs compared with non-behavio...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... awesome new work out today! From the Lee lab in the intramural research program at NIMH!

Dynamic regulation of cortical interneuron wiring Inhibitory interneurons play crucial roles in modulating the circuits and activity patterns of the cerebral cortex. In particular, interneurons must a…

Our little update on the latest knowledge on interneuron wiring! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Developmentally distinct architectures in top–down pathways controlling threat avoidance - Nature Neuroscience Through circuit dissection in juvenile, adolescent and adult mice, Klune, Goodpaster and colleagues reveal multiple developmental switches in mPFC–NAc and mPFC–BLA pathways that underlie developmental...

Nature Neuroscience

Developmentally distinct architectures in top–down pathways controlling threat avoidance

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

The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations - Nature Neuroscience Sensory experience transforms endogenously structured cortical networks with diverse and unreliable visual responses into reliable representations. This process is proposed to involve the alignment of feedforward and recurrent networks.

The developmental emergence of reliable cortical representations

🧠🤖

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

Classification of psychedelics and psychoactive drugs based on brain-wide imaging of cellular c-Fos expression - Nature Communications A challenge in psychiatric drug discovery is to predict the therapeutic potential of a novel compound. Here, the authors show that brain-wide imaging of immediate early gene expression can be used to ...

Can whole-brain imaging of cellular c-Fos signals be used to classify #psychedelics? 🧠🔬💊

Our study by @aboharbf.bsky.social and @pashadavoudian.bsky.social, developing an imaging and machine learning pipeline to test a panel of psychoactive drugs.

Paper here 👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#Cellpose 3 paper now out. Not all images are perfect. Restore your images with Cellpose3 to get better segmentations, w/ @marius10p.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Slow cortical dynamics generate context processing and novelty detection The brain efficiently processes sensory information by selecting novelty and discarding redundancies. In this work, Shymkiv et al. demonstrate that through a high-dimensional ensemble representation, ...

Neuron

Slow cortical dynamics generate context processing and novelty detection
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Overwriting an instinct: Visual cortex instructs learning to suppress fear responses Fast instinctive responses to environmental stimuli can be crucial for survival but are not always optimal. Animals can adapt their behavior and suppress instinctive reactions, but the neural pathways...

So excited to see this out, heroic effort by the brilliant Sara Mederos, uncovering the detailed brain mechanisms of how animals learn to overcome their instinctive fear responses, from neural circuits & cell types down to synaptic plasticity mechanism! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A Neuropixels Opto probe with 3 blue emitters and 3 red emitters lighting up in succession, with corresponding neural activity in different layers of the cortex.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of

Neuropixels Opto

Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics

Today in bioRxiv

960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors

By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al

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

(1/2)

Link to our paper www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

🪄🪄Really grateful and honored so see this commentary by Dr. A. Dunaevsy and Dr. R. Padmashri labs on our recently published paper in Biological Psychiatry -collab with Anis Contractor lab-🪄🪄

www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...