@EngertLab
 Harvard University
engertlab.org
Joined July 2015
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Yet another cool story just came out of the ever so capable hands of Roy Harpaz (@RoyHarpaz). rdcu.be/ftQKm Roy showed that larval zebrafish will adapt and get used to crowded conditions, and that they are then, later on, less sensitive about their personal space.
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And he showed that the way fish measure and quantify the local population density is by integrating specifically over looming events - rather than just motion clutter. That makes sense, because loom are a very particular signature of approaching siblings - but anything can move.
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The way this was show was pretty elegant: if you expose naive animals to local virtual looming blobs, then they learn to be cool with crowded situations later on. However, if you expose them to blobs that rotate around them (without changing size) they don't adjust. Nice!!
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Here is the link to a paper that just came out on "Social interactions in medaka". sciencedirect.com/science/ar… It's a story that was spearheaded by Roy Harpaz, where he looked into the fish's sensitivity to social cues, and how this sensitivity depends on the current swim state.
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Specifically, Roy could show that adult medaka respond much more reliably to neighbors when they swim at constant speed, that they are less responsive during accelerations, and that they care very little during decelerations.
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It's a really cool demonstration of how behavioral states can influence and modulate sensory receptivity, and it allows one to speculate why it might be an advantage to extract socially relevant features while swimming at a smore stable constant velocity.
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How much do we *really* learn? In @NatRevNeurosci with @EngertLab and @AFerreiraCastro, we address why most of you humans firmly believe that patterned activity plays a necessary and instructive role in shaping neural circuits. nature.com/articles/s41583-0…

Three systems of circuit formation: assembly, updating and tuning

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - In this Perspective, Barabási, Ferreira Castro and Engert challenge the notion that learning and plasticity primarily drive the assembly of neural circuits. They...

nature.com
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Check out the latest project that came out of the phenomenally productive collaboration that Roy Harpaz (@RoyHarpaz) has initiated a few years ago by bridging the joint expertises of @engertlab and the team of Mark Fishman (also here at Harvard).
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This modeling framework accurately captures our behavior findings, and allows us to make novel behavioral predictions that we confirm in subsequent experiments.
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This mechanistic reductionist approach allows us now to make explicit predictions about the underlying neural circuits in the visuomotor processing stream, and thereby guide future whole-brain imaging and neural recording experiments to get at the underlying neural circuits.
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Florian Engert retweeted
MCB_Harvard@MCB_Harvard31 Jan 2024
Nature Over Nurture: Functional Neuronal Circuits Emerge in the Absence of Developmental Activity [Engert Lab] @EngertLab @GregorFPS @bdanubius mcb.harvard.edu/department/n…
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Now out in @NatureComms, our paper on activity- and experience- independent maturation of sensorimotor behaviors in zebrafish. @GregorFPS @EngertLab Since the preprint, we added new experiments confirming the effect and washout of anesthesia 👇 nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
Dániel Barabási@bdanubius25 Oct 2022
Nature over Nurture: with @GregorFPS and @EngertLab, we find that functional neuronal circuits emerge in the absence of developmental activity. Essentially, complex visuo-motor pathways mature even without activity-dependent refinement 🧵 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Nature over Nurture: Functional neuronal circuits emerge in the absence of developmental activity

During development, the complex neuronal circuitry of the brain arises from limited information contained in the genome. After the genetic code instructs the birth of neurons, the emergence of brain...

biorxiv.org
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Florian Engert retweeted
Lior Pachter@lpachter11 Jan 2024
This has become one of my favorite papers. We're very VERY far away from understanding how the brain works. thelancet.com/journals/lance…

Brain of a white-collar worker

A 44-year-old man presented with a 2-week history of mild left leg weakness. At the age of 6 months, he had undergone a ventriculoatrial shunt, because of postnatal hydrocephalus of unknown cause....

thelancet.com
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