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Ana Marija Jakšić

@merianelion.bsky.social
1.5K followers 3.4K following 139 posts

Group leader @ Jaksic Lab, ELISIR scholar alumna, Drosophila, Neuroscience, Topology, Robots, Evolution, PopGen, Cognition, Corals, she/her, Trekkie utopian 🦄🧬🪰🧠🪸🇪🇺🇨🇭🇭🇷 🌍🖖🏻 On the TT faculty job market

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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
EPFL Brain Mind Institute @epfl-brainmind.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
What makes our behaviors individual? Beyond genes & environment, learning matters too. Ana Marija Jakšić's @merianelion.bsky.social group studied thousands of #Drosophila, & revealed that learning can produce behavioral differences even among genetically identical animals - doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
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Vincent Pasque @pasquelab.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
We have just published a tribute to John Gurdon, reflecting on his scientific legacy and the profound influence he had on generations of developmental biologists. The piece is available open access in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Reversibility, regulation, and the community of development: the legacy of Sir John B. Gurdon - Nature Communications
Nature Communications - Reversibility, regulation, and the community of development: the legacy of Sir John B. Gurdon
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Yesterday I visited the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Swiss Light Source, my second synchrotron this year 🤩 I am so energized after discussions with people there, a truly brilliant place!!✨😉 What an excellent experience, thanks to Adrian Wanner for hosting me!!
A selfie of two scientists in front of one of the synchrotron beamlinesA view of the inside of the Swiss Light Source synchrotron facility
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Neil PollyTicks 🦜 @neilpollyticks.eurosky.social · 02/12/2025
Alt text for those who need it. This is amazing.
Saved by Stoppard
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec I), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of "adjuvant systemic chemotherapy",
", and rapidly
we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
r.
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MPI for Biology Tübingen & Friedrich Miescher Laboratory @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Is human limb regeneration science fiction? 🤯 What if the oxygen we breathe suppresses our ability to regenerate? @canaztekin.bsky.social busts myths and reveals the potential of regeneration. Watch the video: www.fml.tuebingen.mpg.de/71433/videos #BiologyMyths
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Reposted by Ana Marija Jakšić
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 20/11/2025
obligatory
On April 17th, 2020, meme creator Welcome To My Meme Page posted a parody infographic to Facebook,[1] Instagram,[2] and Twitter,[3] titled, "STOP DOING MATH" (shown below). The infographic describes various ridiculous reasons why people should stop doing math, including that "numbers were not supposed to be given names," and ends with the phrase, "they have played us for absolute fools." The post gained over 9,800 reactions on Facebook, 77,000 likes and 23,000 retweets, and 18,500 likes on Instagram in 10 months.
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Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
4) “the complexity of biological phenomena is an argument for the use of mathematical methods rather than against it. In the case of a simple phenomenon we may hope to understand it without the use of mathematics, by simple inspection. But in a complex case we are left hopeless without mathematics.”
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Richard Benton @bentonlab.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
I'm looking to recruit a post-doc to help push forward our growing interests in insect ecotoxicology. Apply here by Nov 30th! (thanks for reposting) career5.successfactors.eu/sfcareer/job...
career5.successfactors.eu
Career Opportunities: Posdoctoral researcher in toxin susceptibility and evolution of resistance in insects (22517)
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Frances Separovic @francesbiophys.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Maud Menten was born in Canada in 1879 and completed her UG and MD education at University of Toronto. As a research assistant with Leonor Michaelis in 1912, they wrote the classic paper describing the “Michaelis-Menten” model of enzyme kinetics.. #WomenInScience
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Ben de Bivort @debivort.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Our new study modeling selection for (behavioral) variability has been covered in a lovely @genetics-gsa.bsky.social podcast featuring first author Shraddha Lall and @ecoevogal.bsky.social academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...
academic.oup.com
Family-based selection: an efficient method for increasing phenotypic variability
This article introduces a model comparing various selection regimes for increasing phenotypic variability. Individuals with the same genotype, reared in id
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Mouse brain, the next TopoTome step towards the holy grail
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Greg Jefferis @jefferis.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
Exciting news for #drosophila #connectomics and #neuroscience enthusiasts: the Drosophila male central nervous system connectome is now live for exploration. Find out more at the landing page hosted by our Janelia FlyEM collaborators www.janelia.org/project-team....
janelia.org
Male CNS Connectome
A team of researchers has unveiled the complete connectome of a male fruit fly central nervous system —a seamless map of all the neurons in the brain and nerve cord of a single male fruit fly and the ...
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Jonathan Peelle @jpeelle.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
"[F]rom the 1940s to the 1970s, a Bell Labs job was said to be just like working at a research university, except the pay was better, the equipment was more up-to-date, the machine shop was available for all your needs and you didn’t have to spend time teaching or applying for research grants."
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
🚨Preprint🚨 What started as an attempt to compare CT scans of diverse fly brains, ended up a new concept for analysis & segmentation of difficult tomographic data. No ground truths, no training, just maths. This is TopoTome, topological data analysis of 3D images www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Figure showing 3 panels. Panel A: workflow of a classical deep learning model vs TopoTome workflow, with marked differences between the methods, including manual segmentation of images, design and optimization of neural network and data post processing that is needed in deep learning workflow but not in TopoTome. Panel B: core concepts behind TopoTome shown connected by arrows. From left to right, there is a microCT scan of a fly brain (3D reconstruction), a persistence barcode of H2 homologies, an image of how persistent barcodes map to the original CT brain scan, and a segmentation of a CT scan. Panel C shows the concept of cubical complex filtration of 2D and 3D image data.
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European Drosophila Society @fly-eds.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
The #EDS has the pleasure to announce that, after #EDRC2027 in Bonn, we will have #EDRC2029 in Szeged! Don’t forget these hashtags!
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
I wonder if the pilot was aware he just flew and safely landed practically the entire Swiss Drosophila fly community to Alicante. High pressure flying the fly people. 🪰✈️
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Kevin Mitchell @wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
The paper itself (with Henry Potter) is here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... (and is the European Journal of Neuroscience's most downloaded paper over the last two years! 😊)
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience
The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...
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Jennifer Groh @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
The larger problem is the textbooks frame things in a "X does Y" kind of way. It's very hard to get people to envision a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system and what that will mean for where signals of different types can be observed...I don't have a good answer for this...
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Ben Hayden @benhayden.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour - Nature
The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task i...
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canaztekin.bsky.social @canaztekin.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
🥳 Thrilled to share that our lab has been awarded an ERC StGrant for our project SigReg: Signal to Regeneration! How can we unlock limb regeneration in adult mammals? It’s time to apply what we learned from 🐸 ➡️ 🐭 Thank you @erc.europa.eu for supporting ambitious science!!!
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Monica H Green @monicamedhist.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️
nytimes.com
Margaret W. Rossiter, 81, Dies; Wrote Women Scientists Into History
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 27/08/2025
My lab cannot afford donating at the moment, so I donated privately. Even if you don’t work on flies we all owe so much to FlyBase. Consider donating, and importantly, let’s strive to make the more official funding bodies aware of how much is at stake.
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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 by Earl K Miller, Scott L Brincat, Jefferson E Roy This promises to be a must read One day we should create an online journal club to just read these kinds of papers! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1016/j.co...
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Marco MILAN LAB @milanlab.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Why would anyone want to be a scientist? url: journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...
journals.biologists.com
Why would anyone want to be a scientist?
It is difficult to fathom why anyone intelligent enough to be a scientist would actually choose to be one. Doing good science requires the utmost exertion of body, mind and spirit, yet is consistently...
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Katja Röper @katjaroeper.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
If you run a fly lab and have not yet contributed to save FlyBase, please look at our wiki page for the latest information!
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Dr Sian Gramates @drglam.bsky.social · 11/08/2025
I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.
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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪 @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr · 19/07/2025
How it started / How it's going 😱 (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... / www.nature.com/articles/s41...) #preprint
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Alex Bisson @archaeon-alex.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
Academia should not be a production where efficiency = many flawless but low penetrance pdfs. People become avoidant of taking risks and become burocrats. It's fine to be wrong. Reproducibility problems is related to ethics, not being right all the time.
scientist.sc
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Brian Stevenson Ph.D. spirochete lab @bstevensonlab.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
Progress with my grant proposal:
Comic view on writing.
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
Apply to this amazing lab and work on exciting and relevant challenges in AI-powered microscopy! Super opportunity to work with someone as cool as Martin!
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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
So what can we do in response? A key problem: The transformation from long- to short-term funding leads researchers to flit from topic to topic, and move across fields chasing 'sexy' stories. Science is done better when you leave someone to geek out on a single topic for their whole career. 5/n
Abstract

The ReproSci project retrospectively analyzed the reproducibility of 1006 claims from 400 papers published between 1959 and 2011 in the field of Drosophila immunity. This project attempts to provide a comprehensive assessment, 14 years later, of the replicability of nearly all publications across an entire scientific community in experimental life sciences. We found that 61% of claims were verified, while only 7% were directly challenged (not reproducible), a replicability rate higher than previous assessments. Notably, 24% of claims had never been independently tested and remain unchallenged. We performed experimental validations of a selection of 45 unchallenged claim, that revealed that a significant fraction (38/45) of them is in fact non-reproducible. We also found that high-impact journals and top-ranked institutions are more likely to publish challenged claims. In line with the reproducibility crisis narrative, the rates of both challenged and unchallenged claims increased over time, especially as the field gained popularity. We characterized the uneven distribution of irreproducibility among first and last authors. Surprisingly, irreproducibility rates were similar between PhD students and postdocs, and did not decrease with experience or publication count. However, group leaders, who had prior experience as first authors in another Drosophila immunity team, had lower irreproducibility rates, underscoring the importance of early-career training. Finally, authors with a more exploratory, short-term engagement with the field exhibited slightly higher rates of challenged claims and a markedly higher proportion of unchallenged ones. This systematic, field-wide retrospective study offers meaningful insights into the ongoing discussion on reproducibility in experimental life sciences
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Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n
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Rita Strack @ritastrack.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Yes, we should give you guidance up front. Also, as I frequently say, if you ever have a question about what your editor wants to see in a revision, ask us to review/approve a revision plan. I never want my authors losing sleep over my expectations. Truly.
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Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
Attractors are usually not mechanisms - new blog post: open.substack.com/pub/kording/...
open.substack.com
Attractors are usually not mechanisms
The mathematical objects can not be. And the "attractor models" have not been established as mechanisms in mammals
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Riddha Manna @riddhamanna.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
Congratulations Samuel on officially being a PhD now!! Declared in French! You deserve all of it!! Congrats to @merianelion.bsky.social for successfully releasing 2 PhDs in this wild world in less than 5 years!! More to come!!
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
There are now three printed PhD theses on my bookshelf 🥹
Books on bookshelf. Two champagne corks jn front of them. Book titles from left to right: The Mind of a Bee, Time Love Memory, Osnove Genetike, Ecological Genetics and Evolution, PhD thesis by AM Jaksic, PhD thesis by Riddha Manna, PhD thesis by Samuel Bourgeat, On the origin of species, Imaginary animals, Historija filozofije, Population genetics, Progress and prospects in evolutionary biology: the Drosophila model.
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
Why is academia riddled with stale, incremental “low hanging fruit” science programs? When we make decisions on what kind of science to pursue, we can optimize for career payoff or scientific payoff, almost never both. I know I’ll always pick exciting science despite the cost. How about you?
Screenshot of text: Of course, scientists' actions, especially their effort, are observable to those around them - their bosses, their colleagues, their family, and their friends. But these are not the people who ultimately determine whether scientists get the university tenure-track job or are honored by a professional society. Instead, career success accrues based on how the scientific community evaluates scientists' contributions. Thus, it is the scientific community that serves as the ultimate arbiter of investigators' professional success, and this community does not have the means (because of its physical dispersion) or perhaps even the interest to monitor investigators' effort. Indeed, to a first approximation, scientists' careers rise and fall based on their CVs, and CVs list only scholarly outputs, not hours worked or risky undertakings gone bust.Screenshot of text: In deciding how to reward discoveries, the scientific community must contend with the fact that reward schemes that motivate effort inherently discourage scientific risk-taking and vice versa. Because the community must motivate both effort and scientific risk-taking, and because effort is costly to investigators, the community inevitably establishes a tradition that encourages more conservative science than would be optimal for maximizing scientific progress, even when risky research is no more onerous than safer lines of inquiry.
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Marc Robinson-Rechavi @marcrr.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Call from 6 Swiss Fields Medal laureates to preserve science funding science-under-threat.com
science-under-threat.com
Swiss Science Under Threat
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eric lai @lucksmith.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
calling all fly folks, keep an eye out for new system coming soon, through which you can help support FlyBase in this time of dire need.
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MwahahahahahadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
"OnlyFlies"
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Andreas Prokop @poppi62.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
Towards more sustainable research: reducing the environmental impact when working with #Drosophila. Challiner, Saurya., Patel, Raff, Fostier, Prokop, A. (2025) @genetics-gsa.bsky.social‬, in press -- doi.org/10.1093/gene... - Always happy to discuss and hear your ideas and views!
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Mela Eckenfels @felicea.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
And directly from the translation "Otto Hahn, a scientific autobiography."
In addition to her work in the wood shop and her classes
with Planck, Lise Meitner wrote many articles on problems in
physics for the Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau, then edited
by Professor Sklarek, whom she had known in Vienna. I myself
did a great deal of writing about radioactivity and related prob-
lems for the Zeitschrift fiir Elektrochemie. Later we both
reported new developments for the Fortschritte der Physik;
she wrote about themes that were closer to physics, while I
took those related to chemistry. At that time a researcher could
still do this as a sideline—today it would be impossible.
Lise Meitner’s contributions to the Naturwissenschaft-
liche Rundschau evidently were very good, for one day the
editor of the Brockhaus Encyclopedia wrote to Professor
Sklarek to ask for the address of “Herr” Meitner, because he
wanted “him” to write an article for the encyclopedia. In his
reply Professer Sklarek pointed out that his contributor was
female. The encyclopedia editor replied, immediately and heat-
edly, that he would not think of publishing an article written
by a woman!
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
Translated: “Lise Meitner's presentations in the "Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau" were obviously so good that one day the editor of Brockhaus' conversation dictionary asked Professor Sklarek to give him the address of Mr. Meitner, because he wanted an article for his lexicon. 1/2
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 06/06/2025
The first three years I was entirely non-competitive for ERC StG: as a small experimental lab working on evolution and behavior we worked hard to establish the lab which in hindsight we did incredibly quickly, but no manuscript was even close to ready yet. 1/n
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Andrew D Thaler @drandrewthaler.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
Remember all the way back in 2008 when they tried to track down the researcher who isolated the gene responsible for the glowing jellyfish nobel prize and he was a bus driver, now. www.npr.org/2008/10/09/9...
npr.org
Glowing Gene's Discoverer Left Out Of Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded this week to three scientists working in the United States with a jellyfish protein that glows in the dark. But the scientist who isolated the gene for that pr...
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Working Families Party 🐺 @workingfamilies.org · 01/06/2025
Happy Pride. Take a few minutes to listen to some queer voices of the past. Because queer, trans, LGBTQ+ people have always existed and will always exist. No matter what certain lawmakers in DC try to do.
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Ben de Bivort @debivort.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
71.5% proposed cut to NSF BIO directorate.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Presidential budget is out. Here's NSF. Biggest cut, by amount, is $1 billion, or 66.8%, from MPS (Physics & Math directorate). nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...
MPS budget
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Ana Marija Jakšić @merianelion.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Bumped into this meme on reddit and omg it’s so true and hilarious that I just had to make a real photo version of it 😂
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Cheshire Cat ᓚᘏᗢ, @autismsupsoc.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
The related study:
pnas.org
Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans | PNAS
Biological ensembles use collective intelligence to tackle challenges together, but suboptimal coordination can undermine the effectiveness of grou...
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