A million LEDs, and a new way to write on cortex
Researchers report a microLED-based, mesoscale optogenetics platform designed to stimulate primate cortex over centimeter-scale areas with exceptionally high spatial resolution (on the order of a million pixels). In a primate model, patterned stimulation could evoke saccades that followed expected retinotopic organization, and these responses remained stable over long timescales (reported as more than a year). The work positions optical stimulation as a route to more precise, durable neuromodulation than many conventional electrode-based approaches, with clear implications for future visual prosthesis concepts and optical brain–computer interface designs.
Why it might matter to you:
If you’re thinking about how large-scale neural circuits remain stable while still learning, this kind of high-density, long-term stimulation tool could enable sharper causal tests of circuit-level maintenance versus drift. It also hints at experimental designs where fine-grained perturbations can be repeated over months, helping separate short-lived plasticity effects from durable network-level changes.
A new piece in mitosis: the corona that “catches” microtubules
A PNAS study examines how the kinetochore “corona” contributes to chromosome congression by mediating transient interactions with microtubules. The authors frame congression as a challenging search-and-capture problem: chromosomes begin scattered and must be moved into a narrow metaphase plate for accurate segregation. By focusing on the corona’s role as an interaction hub—supporting brief, repeated microtubule contacts—the work aims to clarify mechanisms that make congression robust despite the stochasticity of spindle dynamics.
Why it might matter to you:
Even though this is cell biology, it’s a clean example of how biological systems use many weak, short-lived interactions to achieve reliable global outcomes—an engineering principle that also shows up in neural circuit stability. If you model or reason about maintenance in plastic systems, it may offer a useful analogy for how redundancy and transient binding events can yield error-tolerant organization.
The long tail of arboreal life—written in the genome
This Molecular Biology and Evolution paper investigates genomic changes associated with repeated evolution of tail elongation in arboreal snakes. The authors generate a chromosome-level genome assembly for the green cat snake (Boiga cyanea) and compare it with the Asian vine snake (Ahaetulla prasina), pairing these resources with evolutionary analyses. They report accelerated evolution and signatures of positive selection in genes tied to somitogenesis and axial patterning (including regulators such as HES7 and TBX18), along with a shared amino-acid substitution in LOXL3. The study also highlights convergent divergence in conserved nonexonic regulatory elements near the GDF11–LIN28–HOX13 axis, with functional assays suggesting altered regulatory activity.
Why it might matter to you:
If your work links circuit function to developmental constraints and evolutionary trade-offs, this is a strong template for connecting morphology to both coding changes and regulatory architecture. It also underscores how convergent phenotypes can arise from a mix of selection on core developmental genes and shifts in noncoding control—useful context when thinking about which biological “knobs” are most evolvable.
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