Rules of academia: Questions are more important than facts Answers are temporary Models are provisional Failure happens a lot Patience is a requirement When you’re lucky, hopefully you realize it Things don’t unfold linearly If there’s free food, get there early —Stuart Firestein

The Department of Genetics has launched the 2024 Faculty Recruitment initiative! Please share this information with those who may be interested in joining our phenomenal community!

we're live - Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory #CSHLGlia 2024 meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.aspx?… NEW DATE: Aug 20-24 SAME RULES: LOADS of trainee talks, LOADS of exciting sessions (building & remodeling a nervous system; modeling glia in humans, degeneration, regenerations, & disease; brain borders; circuit control)

We also have a new preprint! Bringing together dynamics, astrocytes, and RL. How might astrocytic slow time-scales and nested loops of modulation enable learning over contexts? Luke Gong w/ Thomas Papouin (Papouin Lab - WashU) and Fabio Pasqualetti . arxiv.org/abs/2311.03508

My postdoc work @WUSTL is online. With ShiNung Ching (Ching Lab) Thomas Papouin (Papouin Lab - WashU) Fabio Pasqualetti, we propose a comprehensive network model for neuro-astrocyte interactions, which enables efficient context-dependent learning in dynamic muti-armed bandit tasks. arxiv.org/abs/2311.03508

Congrats to our team — including Michelle Cahill and our collaborators in the Etchenique lab — for developing a new photoactivatable Norepinephrine 🎉

Final version of this is out now Nature Communications! Quick recap: we used miRNA targeting to generate AAVs with improved astrocyte specificity nature.com/articles/s4146…

You can open a neuroscience textbook and read about the basic input-output function of neurons, right? We—astrocyte biologists—were jealous. PhD student Michelle Cahill wanted to map input-response dynamics in astrocytes. Surprising results in here: x.com/biorxiv_neursc… 1/x

This is HUGE 😍 | Injury-specific factors in the cerebrospinal fluid regulate astrocyte plasticity in the human brain | Nature Medicine nature.com/articles/s4159…

I am happy to share our recent story on how aging affects astrocytes in the human brain. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Interested in postdoctoral training in fundamental neurobiology in an environment of a world-leading R&D unit, apply to have the best of both worlds! Please RT 1/5

Presenting at #ASN2024 #Portland tomorrow. Come check out this session on the coolest cells in the brain - astrocytes!! 04/17, 9.30 - 11.30 am, Salon I. Huge thanks to Liz H Moss for organizing.

Bravo Cagla!!

This might make some waves: norepinephrine doesn't remodel synaptic function and behavioral states by signaling onto neurons. It does so by mobilizing astrocytes. Companion preprints by @LeftonKatie & Alex Chen with Misha Ahrens biorxiv.org/content/10.110… biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Excited to announce that a part of my thesis work with Misha Ahrens and Florian Engert is out on bioRxiv! Summary 🧵⬇️, but first let me shout out this incredible companion piece by @LeftonKatie with Thomas Papouin (Papouin Lab - WashU)

As promised: STARDUST2.0 with code release, for those looking to capture regional calcium dynamics in astrocytes. Amazing work from Yifan Wu and Miko Dai biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Very important work from Pat Sheehan Erik Musiek Time of day matters for glia. It has made some confusing data in our lab much less confusing now. This is super important for the field.

A new plot post about interesting recent papers on astrocytes - how they interact with neuromodulation, neurons and blood vessels: gcamp6f.com/2024/07/08/fou… With some cool work by Thomas Papouin (Papouin Lab - WashU), Justin Lines, AraqueLab, Kira Poskanzer, Misha Ahrens and others.

For the astrocyte aficionados wondering how to extract Ca2+ data from their 2P recordings - we hope this will be useful. Fantastic work put together by Yifan Wu and Miko Dai and further improved by reviewers! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Delighted to see not one, not two, but three papers about astrocytes in Science today! Here's our contribution to that collection. Come follow us on bluesky! Papouin lab twitter/X: over & out... science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…