Lab is thrilled to leave frigid NY to go to sunny San Diego for #SfN2025 😂
Mon AM posters:
LBP182 - Psilocybin and layer 1 interneurons
LBP183 - Psilocybin in chronic stress model
LBP184 - Drugs + snRNAseq
Tue PM posters:
LL18 - Psilocybin and pyramidal cell types
MM3 - Drugs + rabies tracing
🧠 The Cai Lab will be at #SfN25!
Be sure to stop by the poster sessions to check out Hailey's work on decision-making, @zachtpennington.bsky.social's work on stress, @zoechristensonwick.bsky.social's work on seizures, Alexa's work on cocaine seeking, and Sandra's work on context representations 🤓
Coming to the Society for Neuroscience meeting? Come to my lecture and say hi. I'm going to be talking about some crazy stuff. #neuroscience #SFN2025
Thrilled to announce I'll be starting my own neuro-theory lab, as an Assistant Professor at @yaleneuro.bsky.social @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this Fall!
My group will study offline learning in the sleeping brain: how neural activity self-organizes during sleep and the computations it performs. 🧵
Thank you Shervin! It was a pleasure to share our work with you guys! 😃
It was again a great pleasure to collaborate with team! Check out our most recent work! 🤔how does brain 🧠 solve time and space in generalization task!
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)
Schematic of the experiment
Our latest work led by @claraliao.bsky.social is a collaboration with the other Kwan lab @kwanlab.bsky.social
We used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to measure transcriptional responses in the mouse medial frontal cortex following a single dose of psilocybin. 🍄 🧠 🧬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thx! 🙏🥰🥰🥰
🥰thx! It will take Aya million years to make an account 🫠
thank you! 😊
Our study for the first time reveals that NREM sleep is not a homogeneous state— NREM sleep has instead a specific microstructure organized into distinct sub-states (d), characterized by pupil size, each pupil state promoting either novel or prior memory consolidation.
Finally, we investigated the circuit mechanism of these distinct sub-states: small-pupil states exhibit stronger excitatory inputs while large-pupil states show stronger local circuit inhibition.
... while in large-pupil states preëxisting cell assemblies linked to familiar memories were reactivated more frequently.
Analyzing the reactivation of cell assemblies of novel and familiar memories supports our observations! In small-pupil states plastic cell assemblies related to novel memories were reactivated more often; ...
We then did the same small-pupil SWR disruption during sleep— finding that it only impaired novel memories but not the familiar ones (c). These results show that small pupil substates promote the replay of recent memories.
The experiments above show that the small-pupil state is a critical period for memory consolidation. However, does this small-pupil state promotes only new memories or involve both novel and prior memories? We trained mice on both familiar and novel goal locations (c) ...
.. with 2hr sleep in between when we selectively disrupted SWRs in small-pupil or large-pupil states. Then we tested the memory retrieval performance of the mice. They **forgot the reward location with the small pupil disruption but not with the large pupil disruption.** (b).
Since small pupil sizes are more likely to have memory replay, we developed a pupil-guided SWR close-loop disruption system (a), which allows online tracking of pupil size and only disrupts SWR when the pupil is either small or large. We trained mice on a cheeseboard maze (b) ...
We developed an approach that combined pupillometry with high-density electrophysiology to record during natural sleep in mice. (a&b) We found pupil sizes fluctuated in NREM sleep in minute time-scale.Further, pupil sizes are anti-correlated with memory replay probability (c).
There are two hypotheses (fig see☝️):
a. The reactivation(s)/replay of new and old memories are randomly interleaved within the hippocampus.
b. Those memory replays are structured into specific sub-states.
We used the pupil as a brain state marker to test those hypotheses ...
One prominent problem that both biological and artificial neural networks face is the interference between previously stored and newly acquired memories, which can lead to catastrophic forgetting. How do new memories consolidate during sleep without interfering with old ones??
SEEING THROUGH YOUR EYES 👁️:
Excited to share our new paper (which is out now @nature.com !!) with Wenbo Tang, Antonio Fernandez-Ruiz✉️, and Azahara Oliva✉️: we discovered a novel sleep microstructure that promotes memory replay! #Neuroscience #hippocampus
nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/12👇
Also for sure it is a headfixed system no vestibular input sadly 😭
🧐good questions! So far nice pretty like our setup . Myself a gamer tbh mice adapt better to motion in VR than I do 😁
Nice inaugural post on Bluesky! This was a great collaboration between our lab in BME and Ian Ellwood's lab in Neurobiology, Brain, and Behavior, supported by the Mong Neurotech program at Cornell. Great work @misaacson.bsky.social and @hongyuchang.bsky.social!
🚨 Our paper is finally online! 🚨
🖥️🐭 Are you a head-fixed VR user? Interested in integrating VR and eye tracking into your setup? Check this out! 👀💡
🔍 Don’t miss it! 🙌 #Neuroscience #VR #Research
