Mind-blowing to see a project I was part of be on Colbert.

Wrote my congressman and senators today to ask them to speak up against the sudden and capricious cancellation of study sections at the NIH. Delaying funding for essential research into human health is idiotic.

Devastating is right. All NIH study sections and council meetings through Feb 1 canceled. 100s of grant’s review and consideration needlessly halted. Each application represents years of work carefully structured into a proposal to tackle the next most important questions in biomedical research.

Our latest work led by @claraliao.bsky.social is a collaboration with the other Kwan lab @kwanlab.bsky.social

We used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to measure transcriptional responses in the mouse medial frontal cortex following a single dose of psilocybin. 🍄 🧠 🧬

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

MouseGoggles paper is now up on Nature Methods! A mouse VR headset with eye tracking! Lead authors Matt and Hongyu put in incredible effort in this project and it shows!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Based on these findings, we propose that dopamine release depends on the "total valence" of a stimulus, or S = reward + aversion.

We also found that omissions of expected stimuli do not trigger release and that several stimuli with little or no valence lead to minimal release even when they are engaging, showing that PFC dopamine is not simply a surprise signal.

Dopamine release in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is fascinating because it occurs following both reward and aversion. Here we tested what happens when you mix reward and aversion and found that amount of release seemed to depend on the sum of the rewarding and aversive components.

Proud to present work from my graduate student Yating Yang that just posted on BioRxiv.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...