If you’re interested in these questions, I’m recruiting a post-doc to join our team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign! You may find the job posting here: mcb.illinois.edu/climerpostdoc

There’s a lot left to understand here. Why are so few neurons stable? What are the molecular and activity factors that are driving the increased excitability in the stable cells? What is the role of these changes in memory function? Why does drift seem to vary across brain regions and species?

So what drives drift? We looked closely at the neurons and found that a small group of them were stable. These stable neurons were more excitable than neighboring cells, making the fate of the cells predictable.

We then looked at sensory variability - controlling or varying the smells animals received each day. Again, drift persisted at the same rate - suggesting that subtle sensory variability that is not relevant to the task isn’t the driver of drift either.

We first looked at behavior - comparing similar to dissimilar speed profiles - and found that there was no difference in drift between these sets of data. Place cells drifted at the same rate in both sets of behavior, ruling out behavior as the driver of drift.

Representational drift is how neurons change information across time. It is controversial because stable memory is thought to be encoded by stable representations. It may be due to behavioral or sensory variability, so we looked at this in place cells using multisensory virtual reality.

This was a phenomenal team project, and I deeply respect and admire my co-authors. Daniel Oh will finish his PhD soon and Heydar Davoudi is on the faculty job market this fall.

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab!

We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

Very happy to see a Transmitter (@thetransmitter.bsky.social) piece on our recent work on estrous cycle modulation of hippocampal structure and function. Thanks to Sydney Wyatt (@sydneywyatt.bsky.social) for covering the work and its context:

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroendocri...

Benchmarking methods for mapping functional connectivity in the brain | doi.org/10.1038/s415...

What is the best measure of functional connectivity (FC)?

led by @zhenqi.bsky.social in @natmethods.nature.com ⤵️

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 Inactivation of the nucleus reuniens causes relapse of extinguished fear. Here we show this “circuit-induced relapse” depends on hippocampal fear memories and is mediated by hippocampal engrams. Congrats to the team!

✨ Announcing a new glutamate indicator - iGluSnFR4! ✨

Launched as a pair, iGLuSnFR4s and iGluSnFR4f have high-sensitivity and fast activation/deactivation for recording synapses.

More on the indicators and what they are already revealing: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧠📈

This is great from @neuralreckoning.bsky.social

All-optical electrophysiology reveals behavior-dependent dynamics of excitation and inhibition in the hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.20.644347v1

This list has doubled. Who haven’t I found?