Community Stories

illustration showing nodes of a large-scale brain network
July 17, 2025
Dost Öngür introduces a perspectives piece arising from a meeting he recently organized, bringing together experts in neuroscience, psychiatry, and metabolism to discuss how disruptions in brain energy metabolism may contribute to psychiatric disorders—and what might be done to develop innovative therapeutics.
Original article in: Nature Mental Health >
Advances in Gene Therapy for Eye Diseases
July 3, 2025
Connie Cepko provides an overview of her lab’s longstanding work developing gene therapies for ocular diseases using mouse and rat models. She shares images from studies on retinitis pigmentosa, the most common cause of inherited retinal degeneration worldwide—showing, for instance, how gene therapy can combat oxidation to prolong the survival of cone photoreceptors in the mouse retina, as well as preserve the retinal pigment epithelium.
Original article in: PNAS >
Comparison between feature representations from an artificial neural network,
June 30, 2025
How does the brain really see? In a new study, Victoria Zhanqi Zhang and the Ponce Lab reveal that neurons across the primate visual cortex are tuned not just to objects, but to animal features—highlighting a surprising bias in how the brain encodes natural scenes. Their findings shed light on the fundamental principles of visual representation.
Original article in: Science Advances >
image depicting Effects of selective experience rearing on thalamic neuron properties
June 16, 2025
It was long thought that only neurons in the outermost regions of the brain, called the cortex, could adapt and change their properties in response to visual experience. Takuma Sonoda and Chinfei Chen share new findings revealing that the visual thalamus, a structure in the center of the brain, at an earlier stage in the visual pathway than the cortex, can also change based on what animals see. Their discovery expands our understanding of how sensory systems learn and adapt.
Original article in: Cell >

In the News

Cerebral angiography image from Fluoroscopy in intervention radiology showing cerebral artery.
July 31, 2025
The brain has evolved a system that allows it to quickly and efficiently send blood only to the areas that need it most in any given moment. This system is essential to brain function and overall health, yet how it works has remained somewhat of a mystery. New research from Chenghua Gu and colleagues, co-first authors Trevor Krolak and Luke Kaplan, has uncovered new details of how the brain moves blood to active areas in real time.
Original article in: Cell >
photo of a deer mouse
July 31, 2025
New research from Hopi Hoekstra and colleagues, co-first authors Felix Baier and Katja Reinhard, shows how evolution prepared two species of deer mice to adopt different survival strategies in order to take advantage of their native habitats.
Original article in: Nature >
Laurel Gabard-Durnam and Takao Hensch
July 31, 2025
A new study from Takao Hensch and colleagues, first author Laurel J Gabard-Durnam shows that repeated exposure to general anesthesia as newborns can prematurely trigger critical periods of development—where the brain is more susceptible to drastic changes in response to the environment—and this may carry long-term consequences. This study confirms in humans something that animal models have predicted for decades.
Original article in: PNAS >

Awards & Honors

blue award ribbon illustration
July 31, 2025
Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.
blue award ribbon illustration
June 18, 2025
Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.