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Ana Marija Jakšić

@merianelion.bsky.social

1.4K followers 3.4K following 130 posts

Group leader @ Jaksic Lab, EPFL, ELISIR scholar, Drosophila, Neuroscience, Topology, Robots, Evolution, PopGen, Cognition, Corals, she/her, Trekkie utopian 🦄🧬🪰🧠🪸🇪🇺🇨🇭🇭🇷 🌍🖖🏻 On the faculty job market

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Nov 6

Best moments in science are these small events of discovery when you finally get the answer to your question and when what you're doing suddenly makes perfect sense. It's like a mind fusion with the world you're trying to understand. - Dan Hartl

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Ben de Bivort @debivort.bsky.social · 3h

Our new study modeling selection for (behavioral) variability has been covered in a lovely @genetics-gsa.bsky.social podcast featuring first author Shraddha Lall and @ecoevogal.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Family-based selection: an efficient method for increasing phenotypic variability

This article introduces a model comparing various selection regimes for increasing phenotypic variability. Individuals with the same genotype, reared in id

academic.oup.com

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 1h

Awesome, congrats!!!

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 1d

(The first concept TopoTome version is now on biorxiv, linked below; stay tuned for the big guns - TopoTome v2)

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

TopoTome: Topology-informed unsupervised segmentation and analysis of 3D images

Biological systems are three-dimensional and complex. Today, images of biological structures can be acquired using different imaging technologies and at increasing resolutions. However, identifying re...

www.biorxiv.org

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 1d

Mouse brain, the next TopoTome step towards the holy grail

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Greg Jefferis @jefferis.bsky.social · 3d

Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....

Male CNS Connectome

A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...

www.janelia.org

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Jonathan Peelle @jpeelle.bsky.social · 4d

"[F]rom the 1940s to the 1970s, a Bell Labs job was said to be just like working at a research university, except the pay was better, the equipment was more up-to-date, the machine shop was available for all your needs and you didn’t have to spend time teaching or applying for research grants."

Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 4d

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

sites.stat.columbia.edu

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 8d

🚨Preprint🚨
What started as an attempt to compare CT scans of diverse fly brains, ended up a new concept for analysis & segmentation of difficult tomographic data. No ground truths, no training, just maths. This is TopoTome, topological data analysis of 3D images

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

Figure showing 3 panels. Panel A: workflow of a classical deep learning model vs TopoTome workflow, with marked differences between the methods, including manual segmentation of images, design and optimization of neural network and data post processing that is needed in deep learning workflow but not in TopoTome. Panel B: core concepts behind TopoTome shown connected by arrows. From left to right, there is a microCT scan of a fly brain (3D reconstruction), a persistence barcode of H2 homologies, an image of how persistent barcodes map to the original CT brain scan, and a segmentation of a CT scan. Panel C shows the concept of cubical complex filtration of 2D and 3D image data.

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

European Drosophila Society @fly-eds.bsky.social · 9d

The #EDS has the pleasure to announce that, after #EDRC2027 in Bonn, we will have #EDRC2029 in Szeged! Don’t forget these hashtags!

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 14d

I wonder if the pilot was aware he just flew and safely landed practically the entire Swiss Drosophila fly community to Alicante. High pressure flying the fly people. 🪰✈️

Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 16d

The paper itself (with Henry Potter) is here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (and is the European Journal of Neuroscience's most downloaded paper over the last two years! 😊)

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience

The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 15d

Excellent opinion paper, I really enjoyed reading it, especially since it very much resonates with how my lab has been thinking about the brain and mechanistic causes and emergence of individual behavior, resolved by time. Congratulations!

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Jennifer Groh @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social · Sep 5

The larger problem is the textbooks frame things in a "X does Y" kind of way. It's very hard to get people to envision a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system and what that will mean for where signals of different types can be observed...I don't have a good answer for this...

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Ben Hayden @benhayden.bsky.social · Sep 4

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain.

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

A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

canaztekin.bsky.social @canaztekin.bsky.social · Sep 4

🥳 Thrilled to share that our lab has been awarded an ERC StGrant for our project SigReg: Signal to Regeneration!

How can we unlock limb regeneration in adult mammals?

It’s time to apply what we learned from 🐸 ➡️ 🐭

Thank you @erc.europa.eu for supporting ambitious science!!!

MPI for Biology Tübingen & Friedrich Miescher Laboratory @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social · Sep 4

Massive congratulations to @canaztekin.bsky.social for being awarded an ERC Starting Grant @erc.europa.eu ! 🎉 His "Signal to Regeneration" (SigReg) project will explore the potential of limb regeneration in mammals.

Read more and watch Can introduce his project: s.gwdg.de/cLAmJE

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić

Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · Aug 30

Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 28

Good luck with this one, lol

a man in a red jacket eating popcorn with the words and here we go behind him

ALT: a man in a red jacket eating popcorn with the words and here we go behind him

media.tenor.com

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 27

No, thank you! Stay strong, we’ll weather this hopefully short storm being a tight community that we are. 💪🏻

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 27

My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 19

I mean, generally the place was actually really great and there were many people vibing with what I proposed to get to interview, but that one conversation really stuck with me :p

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 19

A (not exact) wording was: “you know, today in neuroscience if you can’t get to the neuron level, it will be very difficult to find a way to get it published“

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 19

I was unprepared so tried out a few clumsy metaphors. In retrospect, if I’d just yielded maybe I’d get the job 😂 this was my first encounter with emergence resilience. Most recent one, talking to a Nature Neurosci. Editor. Not so much resilience, but like total lack of interest.

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 19

I’ve been to a job interview where the view of emergence was 100% challenged by a person (& a director of top neurosci. institution). They said that considering behavior as emergent property of brain’s complex structure is mechanistically useless if there is no way to deconstruct it into pieces.

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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 18

Indeed! If it is cheap, but more importantly harmless in case your prediction is off. Exaggerated example: if your genotype’s mean is known to have higher risk for heart disease, recommending you exercise regularly is great, but recommending to have exploratory heart surgery is bad

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 18

If the policy aims to somehow affect or modify a population, it would be useful. If the policy is to somehow affect or modify individuals, not so much.

Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · Aug 18

Sure you can make predictions but they will be wildly inaccurate. So in practice useless for reasoning about individuals or arguing what is the underlying sources for the trait you measured in 1 individual (genetics or env.) (This is not philosophical, it’s just statistics of a polygenic trait.)

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