This is so cool 😍

Really cool video. @ecomorph.bsky.social guides us through all eyes in the animal kingdom! Cephalopod (especially squid/cuttlefish) eyes are the most beautiful of course.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vjm...

@ruthstyfhals.bsky.social, Marie, Jérôme, Lieve, @maxencelanoizelet.bsky.social, @ihardege.bsky.social, @marklassnig.bsky.social, @anna-neuro.bsky.social, Joe, Eduardo, @octoscience.bsky.social, @eveseuntjens.bsky.social, and @wrschafer.bsky.social @mrclmb.bsky.social

I would like to thank all my amazing colleagues who helped me get to this point, particularly my mentors Bill Schafer and Eve Seuntjens!

And despite their very different functional and neurochemical properties, Octopus amacrine cells may execute similar computations to amacrine and horizontal cells in the vertebrate retina.

Taken together, our results strongly suggest that dopamine plays a role in feedforward excitatory pathways, while acetylcholine functions in feedback inhibitory circuits in the octopus visual system.

This also went against a long-held assumption that acetylcholine principally acts as a major excitatory neurotransmitter in most nervous systems.

A second receptor, AChRB1, forms acetylcholine-gated anion channels, and is implicated in inhibition of dopaminergic neurons in the outermost layer of the optic lobes.

This was surprising given the textbook view of dopamine as a neuromodulator that has slower, more long-term effects, and acts exclusively through g-protein coupled receptors in the majority of nervous systems.

Dopamine robustly stimulates neural activity in the optic lobe, particularly in layers where DopC1 is expressed, consistent with a role for this channel in excitatory neurotransmission.

One of these, DopC1, defines a new class of dopamine-gated cation channels that is broadly conserved in many invertebrates.

We functionally characterised and mapped the expression of two key receptors for dopamine and acetylcholine in the Octopus vulgaris visual system.

Coleoid cephalopods such as the common octopus have a complex visual system, with a camera-type eye and a large optic lobe, that evolved independently from its counterpart in vertebrates. However, the molecular and neurochemical basis of signaling in Octopus visual circuits is not well understood.

Very excited and proud to finally share this story! 🐙

We discovered surprising roles for dopamine and acetylcholine in the Octopus visual system…
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Cationic DOPAMINE-gated ion channel! In the octopus visual system! Absolutely wild discovery from @amycourtneyyy.bsky.social ♥️🐙
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The first Octopus paper from the Schafer lab @mrclmb.bsky.social in collaboration with @eveseuntjens.bsky.social lab.
🐙dop-gated cation channel
🐙Ach-gated anion channel
🐙single-cell resolution Ca2+ imaging in optic lobe slices
and more!
Led by the amazing Amy Courtney
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very excited to share that we developed a new non-invasive way to predict spawning time in Octopus vulgaris. Until now, we had no means of knowing when a female was going to spawn, which made planning of our experiments very difficult. But now we solved it! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...