Publications

Caloric depletion induces behavioral changes that help an animal find food and restore its homeostatic balance. Hunger increases exploration and risk-taking behavior, allowing an animal to forage for food despite risks; however, it is unknown which neural...

Navigation requires us to take account of multiple spatial cues with varying levels of informativeness and learn their spatial relationships. Here we investigate this process in the Drosophila head direction system, which functions as a ring attractor and...

Body movement often evokes strong changes in neural activity in visual brain regions. Some of this movement-related activity is locked to locomotion, while other activity is locked to the movements of particular body parts. Visual brain regions are...

Optical Pooled Screening (OPS) enables precise measurement of pooled genetic libraries in single, highly multiplexed microscopy experiments, linking image-based phenotypes to genotypes at genome-scale. However, no method has combined large-scale OPS with...

Animals navigate the auditory world by recognizing complex sounds, from the rustle of a predator to the call of a potential mate. This ability depends in part on the octopus cells of the auditory brainstem, which respond to multiple frequencies that...

Pain hypersensitivity arises from the induction of plasticity in peripheral and spinal somatosensory neurons, which modifies nociceptive input to the brain, altering pain perception. We applied longitudinal calcium imaging of spinal dorsal projection...

To pursue an unpredictably moving visual object, the brain must generate motor commands that continuously steer the object to the midline of the visual field via feedback. Behavior implies that visual pursuit relies on a feedback loop with flexible gain...

The basal ganglia (BG) are an evolutionarily conserved and phylogenetically old set of sub-cortical nuclei that guide action selection, evaluation, and reinforcement. The entopeduncular nucleus (EP) is a major BG output nucleus that contains a population...

The concentrations of extracellular and intracellular signaling molecules, such as dopamine and cAMP, change over both fast and slow timescales and impact downstream pathways in a cell-type specific manner. Fluorescence sensors currently used to monitor...

Single-cell decisions made in complex environments underlie many bacterial phenomena. Image-based transcriptomics approaches offer an avenue to study such behaviors, yet these approaches have been hindered by the massive density of bacterial messenger RNA...

Vibrations are ubiquitous in nature, shaping behavior across the animal kingdom. For mammals, mechanical vibrations acting on the body are detected by mechanoreceptors of the skin and deep tissues and processed by the somatosensory system, while sound...

Animals adapt to environmental conditions by modifying the function of their internal organs, including the brain. To be adaptive, alterations in behavior must be coordinated with the functional state of organs throughout the body. Here, we find that...