"The connectome is like a road map."

Really enjoyed this great book telling the story (and experiments) behind our understanding of the hypothalamus, neuron coding, and 'wireless' neurochemical signaling (oxytocin, prolactin etc)... mitpress.mit.edu/978026255193...

Thank you, that makes sense!

This is a great and interesting paper, congrats! I had one question re the heat map in Fig 2C. How should we interpret the channels that are not found in the peripheral terminal, but are present in the other compartments e.g. Scn9a. Is it really absent or just not detected or hidden by the scaling?

Congratulations, this is a phenomenal paper and one to which I referred many times starting out in the field as a phd student!

Some very nice 50 year old immunostaining that showed for the first time that Substance P was in sensory neurons and their central terminals. Only three pictures, published in Science! www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Congratulations to nih scientists Nima and Lars!

"A distributed coding logic for thermosensation and inflammatory pain" Proud to have been involved in this! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel.
buff.ly/ypISrtx

In science, we don’t give negative data nearly enough love. Showing with genetic precision that CGRP and Substance P aren’t needed for different kinds of acute and chronic pain? That’s huge.

I'm shook!! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Its very exciting. I think we still lack fundamental understanding of how these local efferent effects work. What drives release of the peptide? Is it always spike dependent? Can this happen without APs propagating up to DRG and dorsal root to cause sensation/pain? Can the signals go in reverse?

Come join our lab as Postdoctoral Fellow! The project will investigate the maturation of spinal circuits and their plasticity within chronic widespread pain states.
Apply here: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/... until 11th April.
@ucllifesciences.bsky.social @uclnpp.bsky.social @jobrxiv.bsky.social

I think the amazing thing about patch clamp is it hasn't really ever been superseded as the gold standard to study ion channel function. I think people will still patch 50 years from now !

That's one way to tarnish the Ramon y Cajal name!

This is very interesting. These neurons seem highly similar to the SST/NPPB/OSMR neurons whose activation can drive itch pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34757808/

Thank you for sharing our updated preprint, the results surprised me as much as everyone else!

This study challenges traditional views of pain biology by showing that deleting Substance P and CGRPα does not affect acute or chronic pain in mice, underscoring the complexity of finding effective pain targets.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What I really admire about LeDoux's books is that he changed his mind about whether his pioneering rat fear conditioning studies were actually studying fear at all! And then criticized the field he basically started to highlight the differences between animal instinctual behaviours and human emotion

The book is great. I was amazed at the crazy hours and single minded dedication at the rig it took to make some of his early discoveries...And I just clocked the forward is by the also remarkable Nancy hopkins, really recommend The Exceptions about her campaign at MIT!

Very excited to read this once it comes out!

Quite a find! Need to order this one!