New op-ed in Nature: The Trump administration's assault on freedoms and the rule of law is an existential threat to US science. We urge scientists to speak out in defense of freedoms, not just funding. With Andrea Liu of UPenn and Sidney Nagel of UChicago! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01466-5
Andrew Leifer
@AndrewLeifer@neuromatch.social
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Studying how the brain of a small worm processes information and generates actions. Assistant Professor of Physics and Neuroscience at Princeton University.
Congrats to authors Wayan Gauthey, Francesco Randi, Anuj Sharma and Sandeep Kumar!
New single-figure paper out in Current Biology: Light evokes stereotyped global brain dynamics in C. elegans by first author Wayan Gauthey.
Immobilized worms exhibit stereotyped neural oscillations often called manifolds. We wondered: are they internally generated? Gauthey shows that bright light commonly used for imaging is sufficient to evoke the oscillations and that a known light-sensitive pathway contributes.
The worm is a uniquely powerful playground to understand the interplay between a neural network’s structure, transcriptome and function and we are excited to help contribute a new piece, signal propagation, to the puzzle.
Our measurements also provide an empirically grounded method of running simple simulations to predict the network’s response to arbitrary stimulation, in this interactive web app here: https://funsim.princeton.edu
The signal propagation atlas itself is a resource for the C. elegans community to help make sense of individual circuits and behaviors. It can also be browsed interactively online and compared to the connectome here: https://funconn.princeton.edu
The ability to compare wiring to signal propagation in the worm may help inform our understanding of new connectomes coming online in flies and other organisms.
We found several instances of wireless signaling, including on fast timescales: peptides released extrasynaptically travel across the milieu to bind other neurons. Extrasynaptic peptidergic signaling is not new, but we argue its role in neural dynamics may be underappreciated.
We find some interesting surprises. Eg. a connectome-constrained model of neural dynamics often poorly predicts our measured responses, because: 1) the connectome is ill-suited to constrain all parameters needed for accurate prediction and 2) neurons also signal “wirelessly”, ie via dense core vesicle mediated extrasynaptic signaling.