Three must read papers for PhD students. #scisky #PhD #science #research #academicsky

1. The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Open Access
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019).

The renamed:

Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

Huge thanks to my collaborators on this: @caswell.bsky.social , @abrate.bsky.social, Robin Hayman and Dennis Chan (who aren’t on here).

Place fields were less stable in the AD mice (this also improved across days). The stability of place cells correlated with the memory performance!

5/5

Place cell stability decreased more rapidly in AD mice than WT’s. Importantly, stability increased in session 2 (following rest) in WT but not AD mice.

4/ 5

MUA rate in the rest between sessions was not different between AD and WT mice. BUT – recruitment of cells to MUAs, and the structure within MUAs, was reduced in the AD mice!

Both recruitment to MUAs and structure within MUAs were predictive of place cell stability.

3/5

APP NL-G-F mice (which avoid APP overexpression) had decreased memory performance in a radial-arm maze task.

Compared to WT’s, the AD mice were more likely to return to arms they had already visited in trial, rather than visiting unique arms. But they did improve across days!

2/5

Excited to share that our preprint is out!
doi.org/10.1101/2024...

The structure of place cell reactivations was disordered in AD mice compared to WT! This was predictive of reduced place cell stability and memory performance on a radial-arm maze task.

Here are a few details:

1/5🧵

Our latest preprint has landed www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Fantastic work from @laurenb29.bsky.social and Will de Cothi showing how many of the cell types associated with subiculum (e.g. boundary vector cells, corner cells) can be understood as successor features. TLDR: SUB not CA1 is the SR

Huge congrats to @karyna-mi.bsky.social for her paper published today in Science! She found that the hippocampus is really important for a key strategy we use to make decisions called hidden state inference! 🧪 🧠https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq5874 1/7

What are the brain’s “real” tuning curves?

Our new preprint "SIMPL: Scalable and hassle-free optimisation of neural representations from behaviour” argues that existing techniques for latent variable discovery are lacking.

We suggest a much simpl-er way to do things.
1/21🧵