Vinny Costa

Jealous

Also Echo’s customer support is very responsive and no bullshit. I look at one PDF on the Keyence website and 47 different reps call me to sell me a rock tumbler.

I get that there are fancier better scopes, like those from Keyence or Zeiss. But as an experimentalist I want shit that works on a mesoscale level and doesn’t require a PhD optics to use. Echo’s scopes fit the bill 100% in that regard.

Give me my images and let me get on with my science.

I have a Revolve in the wet lab that literally has revolutionized how we do immunostaining.

And I bought a Revolution stitch large format Z-stacks.

I am salivating over there scanning confocal.

On the Echo, I take an image, I transfer it, and I just plop it into ImageJ or QuPath and start analyzing. No 5000 clicks and buttons and options and other fuckery to slow me down.

All microscopes suck, some are useful.

Slower acquisition than the Echo Revolution. Also the Analyzer software is terrible whereas the Revolution automatically computes the EDF on the fly and just generates a stitched image at the for direct OME TIFF output. I hate the Analyzer software. It is completely non-intuitive.

@tollkuhn.bsky.social

I still found BZX-1000 was slower than Echo Revolution for stitching large format multichannel Z-stacks for macaque tissue. Echo scope was also substantially cheaper and I have undergraduates using it on the regular. Bonus the software is far more intuitive.

Congrats!

Thrilled that this first empirical paper out of the lab is posted, led by Sandarsh Pandey, asking:

Depression (and other internalizing disorders) involve profound changes to sense of self. How can we study these differences using rigorous decision-making methods?

(alt link: tinyurl.com/2kk59dje)

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Optical illusion of a woman bent over some papers. Her sunglasses are pushed up and she is wearing a hair band so the top of her head looks exactly like a Muppet face

Sorry I know the world is in a terrible fix but I've been laughing at this for ten minutes now

We made a highly blue-light resistant red-fluorescent genetically encoded calcium sensor GECI) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

BluePrint™ 🗺️ below:

Great except the wiring of the brain isn’t especially random (c.f. the fornix).

Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation Animals in rapidly changing environments, such as cities, should optimize information gathering to learn about and efficiently forage in these heterog…

Trash pandas show effort-based discounting of “exploratory” decision making.

Optimally claims aside, I genuinely love this study.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bring On Defunct: The iPod Enthralls Young Music Listeners

Happy to sell my poop brown Zune to the highest bidder…

Bring On Defunct: The iPod Enthralls Young Music Listeners www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/t...

Bellair’s? Jealous you get to check that off the bucket list.

Reach out, happy to help get your lab started using the RMAs.

Should work in marmosets if Fc receptor genetic overlap is high enough. Actually given smaller brain volume & higher neuronal density/mm I bet you would get even higher SNR, similar (rhesus brain is too damn big). But probably best to optimize to each species.

Thanks Eliza!

This. is. amazing.

Thanks Lauren!

You can also order the constructs from @uncneurotools.bsky.social where the plasmids are banked.

For NHP users this is our go-to-core because of their extra purification step when producing constructs for NHPs. Give them your business!

Thanks Rachel!

All of the constructs are available on @addgene.bsky.social. If you are interested in using these tools please reach out to @jerzyszablowski.bsky.social and I. I very much want these tools to be used by the NHP community to lower barriers to adopting and molecular and genetics tools in NHPs.

So we now have a tool for monitoring gene expression in vivo from multiple brain regions and cell types simultaneously that predicts ex vivo expression.

As we allude to in the paper RMAs open up a new set of opportunities for behavioral & translational neuroscience in NHPs & eventually humans.

So we could use RMAs to monitor in vivo gene expression but could we also use them to predict ex vivo transduction levels? Turns out, yes!! The peak RMA signal predicts the strength of ex vivo expression!

Could we track Cre-Lox recombination within amygdala neurons in realtime with weekly blood draws? Yes!!! And the timing differed from a non-Cre dependent NHP-RMA

So Jerzy and Sin designed a CRE-dependent NHP-RMA and we injected into the amygdala alongside a Cre-dependent chemogenetic AAV after we injected a retrograde AAV into the nucleus accumbens to deliver Cre to those neurons.

McKenna Romac, a technician in my lab at ONPRC and now a graduate student at Emory, and I were in the middle of doing circuit specific chemogenetic experiments at the time. We wondered if we could use the NHP-RMAs to monitor in vivo Cre-Lox recombination within amygdala circuitry.