The cells in a multicellular organism develop via a lineage that starts with the fertilized egg. Lineage trees describe the divisions and specializations of cells over time, as…
I have been intrigued by bacterial flagellar motors since 1973, when Bob Anderson and I argued that bacterial flagellar filaments are rigid helices driven at their base, rather…
MCB Research Professor of Neurosciences John E. Dowling has published a book on vision and ocular diseases with his brother, ophthalmologist Joseph L. Dowling of the Rhode Island…
Animals balance efficiency and flexibility during natural behavior to make their decisions in different contexts. In a recent study published in Current Biology (PDF) the Murthy lab has…
In vertebrate nervous systems, vast interconnected networks of neurons underlie brain function. Connectomics is a new field that attempts to map out these networks. At the forefront of…
Dopamine plays an outsized role in the public imagination, acting as a ‘happiness’ chemical, the drug that causes psychosis, or the pill that allows frozen people to move…
To avoid injury, most organisms react reflexively to the approach of incoming objects. For instance, humans will, without thinking, dodge an oncoming car or bat away a small…
Brains process external information rapidly at a sub-second time scale, which is set by the dynamic electrophysiological properties of neurons and the fast communication within neuronal populations. This…
(l to r) Alex Schier, Martin Haesemeyer and Florian Engert As we explore our environment we constantly experience new sensations – changes in the visual scene, different sounds…
The surface of the human brain has many folds (is gyrified), quite unlike the smooth surface of the mouse brain. This gyrification correlates with the increase in size…
