Animals use multiple sensory systems to identify signs of danger, including dead conspecifics. Fish can identify decaying conspecifics from chemosensory cues, which prompt a long-lasting avoidance; th...

An imaging system developed to record cellular activity throughout the whole body of zebrafish captures cellular organ dynamics and identifies multiple distributed circuits.

Variability is a prominent feature of animal behavior across species. Despite highly controlled experimental conditions, the same individual often responds differently to repeated identical stimulatio...

How does social experience shape collective behavior? Here, authors show that larval zebrafish use visual-social encounters in crowded or sparse environments to dynamically retune social interactions,...

Thalamocortical projections shape the functional regionalization and parallel sensory computations across the mammalian cortex. However, the principles of thalamocortical computations in non-mammalian...

Interview with Mark Fishman, who uses the zebrafish to study body–brain interactions and the genetic structure of social behavior at Harvard University.

Gene expression patterns underlie development, but their systematic detection in whole embryos has remained elusive. We introduce a whole-embryo imaging platform using multiplexed error-robust fluores...

In a new study published in Cell Reports, (PDF) researchers from the labs of MCB’s Florian Engert and Mark Fishman of the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative […]

Animals reprioritize behavioral goals in response to internal physiological states. Using larval zebrafish, we investigated whether engagement with a …

Nature - Using two-photon microscopy with a panoramic virtual reality setup, how head direction cells in larval zebrafish integrate visual landmarks and optic flow to track orientation is revealed.

A new paper in Nature Methods (PDF) from the labs of MCB’s Jeff Lichtman and Aravinthan Samuel, of the department of physics and Center for Brain Science, introduces […]

Parenting behavior emerges from hormonally sensitive circuits, but how distinct circuit components are affected by, and contribute to, sex and state dependent changes in infant caregiving remains uncl...

Behavioral thermoregulation is critical for survival across animals. Balakrishnan and Haesemeyer discover that thermoregulatory behavior in larval zebrafish is organized into longer-term swim modes. T...

Attentional switching in larval zebrafish suggests a basis for focus and competence while performing a task.

They look like crawling leaves, but these sea slugs are anything but ordinary. MCB Professor Nick Bellono calls them “the weirdest animal we’ve ever studied”—a bold claim from […]

A new study published in Cell from the lab of MCB faculty member Nick Bellono reveals that octopuses detect microbial cues on surfaces to distinguish prey and eggs […]

Author summary As animals explore their environment, they constantly encounter new sensory information. Some sensory inputs come from their own movements, such as sounds while walking across leaves wh...

Both neurons and glia communicate through diffusible neuromodulators; however, how neuron-glial interactions in such neuromodulatory networks influence circuit computation and behavior is unclear. Dur...

Although topographical maps organize many peripheral sensory systems, it remains unclear whether olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) choose which of the ~1100 odor receptors (ORs) to express based upon t...

Accumulating information is a critical component of most circuit computations in the brain across species, yet its precise implementation at the synaptic level remains poorly understood. Dissecting su...

ZAPBench evaluates how well different models can predict the activity of over 70,000 neurons in a novel larval zebrafish dataset.

Nature - New data on brain-wide circuits centred around two interconnected hypothalamic neuron populations provide significant mechanistic insights into the emergence of social need during social...