Publications

Valproic acid (VPA) is a drug with both anticonvulsant and antimanic properties. It has been widely prescribed to treat epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and other neuropsychiatric conditions for decades, but prenatal exposure is linked to developmental...

The bacterial flagellar motor drives bacterial swimming and chemotaxis by rotating helical flagellar filaments. When Escherichia coli navigates chemical gradients, the motor switches from counterclockwise (CCW) during forward swimming to clockwise (CW)...

Connectomics provides nanometer-resolution, synapse-level maps of neural circuits to understand brain activity and behavior. However, few researchers have access to the high-throughput electron microscopes necessary to generate enough data for whole brain...

Escherichia coli swims using helical flagellar filaments driven at their base by a rotary motor. Torque-generating "stator" units drive the bacterial flagellar motor by transmitting mechanical power to a cytoplasmic "rotor," the C-ring. Each stator unit...

A key function of the brain is to categorize sensory cues as repulsive or attractive and respond accordingly. While we have some understanding of how sensory information is processed in the sensory periphery, the classification of cues according to...

Small ectotherms, including larval zebrafish, must thermoregulate by navigating up and down thermal gradients: new work quantifying the underlying behavioral algorithm and rich neural representations illuminates the strategy behind larval zebrafish...

The difficulty of cryopreservation has long been a limitation of Drosophila melanogaster as a genetic model organism. Here we report a statistically significant improvement in the efficiency of Drosophila cryopreservation by substituting limonene with the...

Chemotaxis to a potential mate who is moving and emitting a volatile sex pheromone poses a navigation challenge that requires rapid, precise responses to maximize reproductive success. We demonstrate that Caenorhabditis elegans males address this...

Advances in functional brain imaging now allow sustained rapid 3D visualization of large numbers of neurons inside behaving animals. To decode circuit activity, imaged neurons must be individually segmented and tracked. This is particularly challenging...