You walk into a restaurant and immediately become aware of all the smells coming from the kitchen. These scents arise from small, volatile molecules called odorants. While there…
Imagine you’re at your favorite dive bar, and you order a margarita. Usually, the bartender arrives with your drink within 10 minutes, but occasionally, she forgets your order…
Parenting is absolutely fundamental for the survival and wellbeing of offspring in many species. This involves numerous efforts and sacrifices (as most parents will readily acknowledge) but does…
Dendrites are the antennae of neurons, receiving synaptic signals from other neurons. A critical aspect of wiring up complex neural circuits is to make sure that dendrites are…
In papers in Nature Biotechnology and Current Biology, the Schier lab reports how thousands of single-cell transcriptomes can be used to define cell types and reconstruct lineage relationships…
Neural circuits in the mammalian brain comprise hundreds to millions of neurons, connected with each other in complex and highly specific ways. Studies over the past few decades…
Lesioning (damaging) a particular brain region is one of the most important methods in neuroscience for determining the function of that region. Many groundbreaking discoveries were made through…
One of the simplest and highly conserved bacterial shapes is a rod. In order to grow, rod-shaped bacteria restrict their growth so that they maintain a constant width…
In three papers in eLife, the Schier lab provides surprising insights into the regulation of early vertebrate embryogenesis. Focusing on the roles of the TGF-b Nodal signaling pathway,…
Oxytocin and its cognate receptor have been proposed as essential mediators of social behaviors, physiological functions, and emotional responses in many animal species. Oxytocin is an evolutionarily conserved…
