Thomas Frank

Arousal elicits a brain-wide hemodynamic wave independent of locus coeruleus noradrenergic tone https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.06.710089v1

In @elife.bsky.social: Pallium-encoded valence-specific chemosensory amplification of eye-body coordination in larval zebrafish doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

A graphical abstract showing the research question and the operationalization of the study.

Out now in @ebiomedicine.bsky.social 🚨.
Hunger often affects our mood, but is this a conscious or a subconscious process? Using continuous glucose monitoring, we show that differences in mood are driven by hunger ratings, not just glucose. #neuroskyence 🩺
www.thelancet.com/journals/EBI...

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

Isotropic, aberration-corrected light sheet microscopy for rapid high-resolution imaging of cleared tissue - Nature Biotechnology A light-sheet microscope built from off-the-shelf components enables high-resolution clear tissue imaging.

🎉 I am very glad to share that our paper on the rapid isotropic light-sheet microscope has just been published in Nature Biotechnology @natbiotech.nature.com.

🔗 Read the full article:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Massive FOMo seeing the posts of people heading to #SfN2025, all that beach...ehm.. science I’m missing 😭

If you’re there, go say hi to the brilliant Bruno Pilcher and the INSS crew, who just built my lab a custom multiphoton microscope with a spatial light modulator that is pure chef’s kiss 👨‍🍳💋✨

New work from Baier Lab 🧠 🐟

🔗 to paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ohhh, that looks cool, also quite a few nice refs to the immune role of neuropeptides, including in the gut

New paper with @gili-ezranevo.bsky.social & Silvia Henriques from @ribeirocarlitos.bsky.social's lab out in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Appetite, driven by amino acid need 🥚🍖 reshapes olfactory receptor expression so flies 🪰 seek bacteria 🦠 and fermented cues 🥫 to restore nutritional balance ⚖️.

The evolutionary origins of synaptic proteins and their changing roles in different organisms across evolution Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Recent studies have shed further light on the evolutionary origins of chemical synapses, In this Review, Colgren and Burkhardt explore how ancient proteins were...

First neurons didn’t appear overnight. We trace their roots to ancient secretory cells - showing how lifestyle & behavior shaped the evolution of first synapses.🧠🌊 #Evolution #Neuroscience

Our latest in @natrevneuro.nature.com
Link: rdcu.be/eMX3E

@jeffcolgren.bsky.social @msarscentre.bsky.social

Your reminder that many of the muscles, nerves and bones you use to hear and talk with correspond to gill structures in fish. 🧪 #evolution #paleontology

Our latest study on the neurobiology of collective behavior is now posted as a preprint, led by UCSD PhD student Jo-Hsien Yu @anitajhyu.bsky.social @ucsandiego.bsky.social @danionella.bsky.social

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

The most universally agreed upon property that sets emotion/affect apart from everything else is valence: approach/avoid; pleasant/unpleasant. Here they target its computation in flies, where you can really figure out the biology. We know so little about how valence is computed by brains. Exciting!

Wow, looks very exciting! Congratulations to all of you!

A multisensory, bidirectional, valence encoder guides behavioral decisions A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory pe...

How is valence computed in the brain? Check out our new preprint about a single cell that integrates excitatory and inhibitory input across modalities according to valence and impacts behavioral decisions. An exciting collaboration across many labs. Enjoy reading!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The orbitofrontal cortex forms a context-generalized spatial schema that preserves topology and distance Flexible and efficient navigation requires the brain to construct maps that are both topological, preserving the relationships between locations, and schematic, enabling generalization across environm...

Ever wonder if there are spatial maps in the brain outside the hippocampal-entorhinal regions? In this preprint, we describe a novel spatial map in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that preserves the topological arrangements and distance between locations. However, ...

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Want to image the adult zebrafish brain? Here's a nifty design that I made with the help of a talented master's student, Corey Steinhauser.

Supporting files here!
morgridge.org/research/lab...

Hierarchical processing of sensory information across topographically organized thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish brain Thalamocortical projections contribute to the spatial organization and functional hierarchies of the mammalian cortex. Primary sensory cortices receive topographically segregated information from firs...

Check out this exciting study led by Anh-Tuan Trinh from our lab, where we investigated how thalamocortical-like circuits in the zebrafish pallium receive, represent, and integrate sensory information:
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

We currently have open positions for PhD and Postdocs! Interested in learning fUS: please apply!
brainwidenetworks.uni-goettingen.de/open-positio...

Exciting new results now published in Science: responses to visual objects are boosted in the brain's spatial navigation system. Read more in the thread below! Congratulations to all the authors!!

Physik studieren? Oder ein anderes Fach?

In Göttingen geht jetzt beides, mit dem "Bachelor Interdisziplinär", der Physik mit spannenden Disziplinen Eurer Wahl, wie z.B. Künstlicher Intelligenz, Philosophie, Neurowissenschaften, ... kombiniert.

www.uni-goettingen.de/de/studium/6...

Remembering A. James Hudspeth, hair cell explorer Hudspeth, who died 16 August at age 79, devoted his 50-year career to untangling how the ear converts sound into electrical signals.

A. James Hudpseth, who died 16 August at age 79, devoted his 50-year career to untangling how the ear converts sound into electrical signals.

By @callimcflurry.bsky.social

www.thetransmitter.org/hearing/reme...

🚨🚨🚨 Tol2kit announcement! We have rebuilt the wiki that was corrupted a few months ago! We’re in the process of also linking it to the original address. Please visit us here:
tol2kitkwan.genetics.utah.edu
Thank you for your patience!!
#zebrafish #transgenesis #plasmids #sharing

An evolutionarily conserved scheme for reformatting odor concentration in early olfactory circuits Understanding how stimuli from the sensory periphery are progressively reformatted to yield useful representations is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. In olfaction, assessing odor concentration is key for many behaviors, such as tracking and navigation. Initially, as odor concentration increases, the average response of first-order sensory neurons also increases. However, the average response of second-order neurons remains flat with increasing concentration – a transformation that is believed to help with concentration-invariant odor identification, but that seemingly discards concentration information before it could be sent to higher brain regions. By combining neural data analyses from diverse species with computational modeling, we propose strategies by which second-order neurons preserve concentration information, despite flat mean responses at the population level. We find that individual second-order neurons have diverse concentration response curves that are unique to each odorant — some neurons respond more with higher concentration and others respond less — and together this diversity generates distinct combinatorial representations for different concentrations. We show that this encoding scheme can be recapitulated using a circuit computation, called divisive normalization, and we derive sufficient conditions for this diversity to emerge. We then discuss two mechanisms (spike rate vs. timing based) by which higher order brain regions may decode odor concentration from the reformatted representations. Since vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems likely evolved independently, our findings suggest that evolution converged on similar algorithmic solutions despite stark differences in neural circuit architectures. Finally, in land vertebrates a parallel olfactory pathway has evolved whose second-order neurons do not exhibit such diverse response curves; rather neurons in this pathway represent concentration information in a more monotonic fashion on average, potentially allowing for easier odor localization and identification at the expense of increased energy use. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

New preprint on common algorithms and evolutionary inventions that may account for apparent idiosyncratic encoding of odor concentration across species millions of years apart by taking advantage of divisive normalization: steered by Yang Shen, @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social and Saket Navlakha. 1/3

🔗 to original research: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

ZAPBench ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

⚡️ Excited to introduce ZAPBench, our #ICLR2025 spotlight: The Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark measures progress in predicting neural activity within an entire vertebrate brain (70k+ neurons!)

Explore interactive visualizations, datasets, code + paper: google-research.github.io/zapbench

🧠🧪

New paper! We studied how inhibitory circuits shape the processing of olfactory information using a tight interplay between modeling and experiments. Collaboration between @fmiscience.bsky.social and @frankfishlab.bsky.social . doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Exciting opportunity! Strongly encourage to apply.

Visual objects refine head direction coding Animals use visual objects to guide navigation-related behaviors, from hunting prey, to escaping predators, to exploring the world. However, little is known about where visual objects are encoded in t...

🚨New(ish) preprint
In mice, visual objects are encoded in the navigation syst, not much in the visual cx, certainly because they are used for orientation.
This new version now includes cool comp work from @dlevenstein.bsky.social using @kenmiller.bsky.social's SSNs.

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

Order matters: neurons in the human brain fire in sequences that encode information A timing-based code for semantic knowledge in humans complements the established role of firing rates in neural coding.

Order matters: neurons in the human brain fire in sequences that encode information www.nature.com/articles/d41...