Erinne Ong

Thalamic NRXN1-Mediated Input to Human Cortical Progenitors Drives Upper Layer Neurogenesis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.25.650717v1

I begrudgingly admit that actin is pretty cool 🤩

🎥 Primary mouse myotubes labeled with Lifeact-mScarlet-I3 (cyan) and H2B-mStayGreen (red). #FluorescenceFriday

Congratulations to winners of The Brain Prize 2025!
Professors @michellemonje.bsky.social, @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social and @hhmi.org Investigator, and Frank Winkler, Heidelberg University Hospital, have pioneered the field of Cancer Neuroscience.

Learn more: brainprize.org/winners/canc...

Happy to share our new study on the functional reprogramming of neutrophils in the brain tumor microenvironment by hypoxia-driven lactylation
@theaacr.bsky.social
@wistar.org
@moffittnews.bsky.social

The kinase RIPK3 promotes neuronal survival by suppressing excitatory neurotransmission during central nervous system viral infection How innate immune signaling within neurons influences neurotransmission remains poorly understood. Estevez et al. show that the necroptotic kinase RIPK3 promotes neuronal survival during viral infections of the central nervous system by engaging a…

Online now: Online now: The kinase RIPK3 promotes neuronal survival by suppressing excitatory neurotransmission during central nervous system viral infection

This is a flat grey image with cell structures in darker grey. Some of the cells are coloured and shown in green boxes. This image - Segmentation of electron microscopy images with μSAM - shows how the model can segment nuclei, with points and boxes from the user and the corresponding masks predicted by the model. Photo: The underlying image comes from data published in Cell (S0092-8674(21)00876-X). Image created by Anwai Archit using the μSAM tool.

This is a three dimensional representation with a cross-section showing dark patches in different colours and the outside of the structure with bright different colours (green, purple, blue, dark pink, yellow, orange). The image shows plant cells acquired with a fluorescence microscope that were segmented automatically with the model. The underlying data is three-dimensional and the image shows a rendering of the segmented cells, each represented by a different colour. Image from: Nature Methods: s41592-021-01249-6

Automatic cell analysis using #AI

Researchers retrained existing AI-based software on over 17,000 microscopy images with over 2 million structures to develop this new model - Segment Anything for Microscopy: www.uni-goettingen.de/en/3240.html...

#NatureMethods research: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Astrocyte heterogeneity reveals region-specific astrogenesis in the white matter - Nature Neuroscience White matter (WM) astrocytes differ significantly from gray matter astrocytes, with WM astrocytes in the forebrain exhibiting unique proliferation capacity, which is absent in cerebellar WM, suggestin...

White matter (WM) #astrocytes differ significantly from grey matter (GM) astrocytes, with WM
astrocytes in the forebrain exhibiting unique proliferation capacity 🧪🧠

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

Mechanisms of astrocyte aging in reactivity and disease - Molecular Neurodegeneration Normal aging alters brain functions and phenotypes. However, it is not well understood how astrocytes are impacted by aging, nor how they contribute to neuronal dysfunction and disease risk as organis...

Excited to share our review on astrocyte aging, out today! Hopefully the only Friday surprises this week are Liddelow lab publications! 🧪 #neuroskyence @liddelowsa.bsky.social

Update: They were removed from our reviewer assignments completely. I'm so sorry to all those graduate students. Anonymous to protect the identity of the NIH employee I spoke to...I am on study section next month to discuss F awards. We were just instructed to put the F31-Diversity applications on the bottom of our priority list for review because there is a chance we may not be able to review them. My heart is breaking for the grad students and their mentors that put so much work into these just for them to be disqualified and thrown out.

Just in case you thought that removing DEI criteria would mean that everyone is competing equally: NIH is removing grad students from underrepresented backgrounds from the applicant pool altogether. Their applications will not be considered. Other students, not from these backgrounds, will be.

Cancer cells ‘poison’ the immune system with tainted mitochondria Immune cells lose their cancer-fighting prowess after taking tumours’ organelles on board.

Really interesting paper 🧪 🤩

Immune evasion through mitochondrial transfer 😮

Ikeda et al find that #mitochondria from cancer cells can #transfer over to T cells - altering their #metabolism & reducing antitumour immunity

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

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@nature.com

Parental origin of transgene modulates amyloid-β plaque burden in the 5xFAD mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease The 5xFAD transgenic model, popular in Alzheimer’s disease research, exhibits varying cerebral plaque burden depending on the parental source of the transgene. Mice inheriting the transgene paternally...

Are you using 5xFAD mice to study Alzheimer’s disease? Our work out today @cp-neuron.bsky.social may be relevant to you 🐁🧠 Age and sex are known to influence Aβ plaque burden in these mice. Here, we found that the transgene parentage is another strong determinant.

Thread below: (1/11)

Very glad to have contributed to this during my master's! We hope the work resonates as something worth considering within the AD community or more broadly among those using transgenic models.

For a full "bluetorial" please see @aosasmita.bsky.social's excellent breakdown:

bsky.app/profile/aosa...

Parental origin of transgene modulates amyloid-β plaque burden in the 5xFAD mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease The 5xFAD transgenic model, popular in Alzheimer’s disease research, exhibits varying cerebral plaque burden depending on the parental source of the transgene. Mice inheriting the transgene paternally...

Out now in @cp-neuron.bsky.social:

We found that the parental source of the transgene influences amyloid plaque load in 5xFAD mice, highlighting the need to clearly report breeding schemes to support the consistency and reproducibility of AD research using this model.

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

new out in Nature: lovely paper www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tau (blue) and neurofilament (fire) are shown in a primary hippocampal neuron.

For #FluorescenceFriday, tau (blue) and long loops of neurofilament proteins are shown in a primary hippocampal neuron 🔬 #Neuroscience #Microscopy

Glucocorticoids target postnatal oligodendrocyte precursor cells to modulate adult hippocampal network plasticity and stress-induced behavior Early life events shape neuronal networks, and prime juvenile and adult behavior. Severely aversive, early experiences can interfere with brain development and enhance the risk for the onset of psychi...

Cool work on the effects of OPC specific deletion of glucocorticoid receptors!

Glucocorticoids target postnatal oligodendrocyte precursor cells to modulate adult hippocampal network plasticity and stress-induced behavior
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am super excited to share our article addressing a longstanding question in neurobiology: how Ca²⁺ signaling cascades initiated at dendritic spines operate at a distance. Check it out here: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... @cp-cell.bsky.social.

Daily glucocorticoids promote glioblastoma growth and circadian synchrony to the host Gonzalez-Aponte et al. identify daily glucocorticoid receptor signaling as an intrinsic driver of glioblastoma (GBM) progression and a synchronizer of tumor clock gene expression to the host. This work provides an intrinsic circadian driver, and therapeutic target, to slow GBM growth, and offers considerations for glucocorticoid use in the clinic.

Excited to share our latest article! We find that the brain tumor Glioblastoma has a circadian clock that syncs with its host’s environment. These tumors also hijack the circadian clock and use daily signals, like glucocorticoids, to grow 🧠⏱️ @erikherzog.bsky.social
More: www.cell.com/cancer-cell/...

The birth of fruit fly's central nervous system imaged with multicolor #adaptive #lightsheet microscopy. The microscope self-aligns to a signal that appears during imaging.

www.nature.com/articles/nbt...

#flourescent(almost)friday
(make sure to full screen this!) Some hippocampal neurons and dendritic arbors visualized from mCherry with a 3.6x objective in a SmartSPIM using iDisco.

Programming tissue-sensing T cells that deliver therapies to the brain
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What a great initiative! 👉 Highlighting an outstanding paper by another researcher. 👉 Below is a must-read by @jgrutzendler.bsky.social and team 👇

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Homeostatic microglia initially seed and activated microglia later reshape amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s Disease - Nature Communications The role of microglia in Alzheimer’s disease is debated. This paper shows that homeostatic microglia seed amyloid plaques in early disease stages and activated microglia compact plaques at later stage...

Homeostatic microglia initially seed and activated microglia later reshape amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s Disease

This further adds to the mounting evidence that microglia are perhaps much better at Aβ plaque formation than plaque clearance. What a fantastic study 🤩

Important article that challenges the classic view of axons as simple tubes. To what extent they fluctuate in diameter is up for debate - see some thoughts in this commentary piece in @science.org. Exciting time for axon scientists!

Which one are you?
Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
–Peter Medawar

🚀 It's #FluorescenceFriday, and commissural axons are coming at you!

🧪🔬 15-hour time-lapse of chick commissural axons navigating and crossing the CNS midline (and reverse).

One stack taken every 10 minutes. Pixels were color-coded in the z-axis.

#LiveImaging #Neuroscience #Science #Microscopy 🧠✨

Poster for EACR conference on Cancer Neuroscience on 14-16 October, 2025 in Bilbao, Spain featuring various speakers.

SAVE THE DATE

Discuss the interactions between the nervous system and cancer in our first @helloeacr.bsky.social conference on #CancerNeuroscience next year!

🗓️ Oct. 14-16, 2025
📍Bilbao, Spain

📥 Abstracts due June 30, 2025
📥 Register by Sept. 15, 2025

For more info, visit eacr.org/conference/c...

Tlr7 drives sex differences in age- and Alzheimer’s disease–related demyelination Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other age-related disorders associated with demyelination exhibit sex differences. In this work, we used single-nuclei transcriptomics to dissect the contributions of sex ...

Tlr7 drives sex differences in age- and Alzheimer’s disease–related demyelination

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Starting the week strong! Cheering myself up for the next challenges with 15 min of axonal growth cone dynamic madness. F-actin (cyan) and membrane (magenta) show their dance. One image taken every 10 s.🧠🔬
#MicroscopyMonday #LiveImaging #Neuroscience #Microscopy

Playing catchup :) 2 bioRxiv preprints related to our goal of imaging neural activity across entire brains: In Vivo Optical Clearing of Mammalian Brain, synthneuro.org/publications... Imaging the voltage of neurons distributed across entire brains of larval zebrafish, synthneuro.org/publications...