Isaac Vidal, MSc🔬🧬🧫

Time for an update: Still Isaac from Mexico 🇲🇽, now PhD in Neuroscience student in Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦❄️ Currently trying to decipher the early events of how ocular hypertension causes the neurons in the retina to die in glaucoma 👁️. @AcademicChatter

Our paper is officially published today. cell.com/cell-reports-m… In this work, we rationally engineered split fluorescent proteins and enabled live-cell mapping based on fluorescence intensity modulation. ↓cover

Exposome and brain aging: your environment may be shaping your brain faster than you think. The exposome refers to the sum of all environmental exposures you experience across your life including air, water, social conditions and policies. Hernandez and colleagues describe in a new paper in Nature Medicine how the exposome across 34 countries influences brain aging and risk for cognitive decline. Key Points: - Combined environmental exposures explained far more about brain aging than any single factor alone. - Physical exposures like air pollution, temperature and limited green space were linked to structural brain aging. - Social exposures like inequality, reduced rights and poverty were linked to functional brain aging and brain network changes. My take: This is one of those papers that shifts how we think. Brain aging is not just about genes or disease, it is about the world we live in. The cumulative burden of exposures may quietly accelerate aging even before symptoms appear. If we want to change brain health, we must think beyond the clinic and into our communities. Here are 5 points that resonated w/ me: 1- Your environment is not background noise, it is an active driver of brain health across your lifetime. 2- Air quality, water, climate and access to green space may directly influence how fast your brain ages. 3- Social factors like inequality, education and community stability matter just as much as biology. 4- Multiple small exposures can combine and amplify risk more than any single factor alone. 5- Improving environments and policies may be one of the most powerful ways to protect brain health for future generations. nature.com/articles/s4159… #parkinson #alzheimer #dementia

In this new preprint brain PDGFRβ+ cells diverge sharply from their peripheral counterparts after stroke: KLF4 is barely induced and dispensable for fibrotic scar formation. Important because it warns against importing peripheral pericyte/fibroblast programs into CNS cell-therapy design and suggests CNS-specific regulators remain to be found. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

In this new preprint awake two-photon imaging after stroke reveals that contractile pericytes at precapillary sphincters are lost in the chronic phase, and their loss drives persistent neurovascular uncoupling even after reperfusion. Important because it names the specific pericyte subset that replacement therapies would need to restore. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Online now: Astrocyte cell volume dynamics across cortical states and transitions dlvr.it/TS7SZ6

in @CellCellPress, using iDISCO+ clearing & spatial transcriptomics, @nicolasrenier lab maps how cerebral vasculature forms across the whole brain. Reveals three phases—growth, specialization, refinement—linking vascular remodeling to neuronal maturation. cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

A walk in nature reduces rumination & brain activity in an area linked to mental illness. This effect was not seen with a walk in a city.

Excited to share my lab’s new paper out today @CellCellPress. "Touch neurons underlying dopaminergic pleasurable touch and sexual receptivity" Congratulations to this amazing team of scientists. cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

In the past year, there’s been major progress in our understanding of how blood and lymphatic vasculature at the brain borders shape waste clearance and neuroimmune connections. Glad to highlight some of these advances for this series. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/im…

This 2-hour Stanford lecture breaks down how models like ChatGPT and Claude are actually built, clearer than what many people in top AI roles ever get exposed to. Save this and set aside two hours today. It might end up being the most valuable thing you learn all week.

Mesoscale brain imaging just got a major upgrade.  @mengke_yang & colleagues built ULTRA, a #twophoton microscope with >50mm² FOV, spanning 7mm across cortical regions at single-cell resolution, down to 900µm deep, tested in #awakemice👏👏👏 nature.com/articles/s4137…

Mouse 🧠 contains two neural populations with opposite relations to brain state and distinct relationships to blood supply, which together account for brainwide fluctuations in 🩸 volume @Nature @ucl @agnesldm nature.com/articles/s4158… 🇬🇧

Online now: A reciprocal glial circuit calibrates injury information and governs the tissue response balance dlvr.it/TS3Fsm

1/ 🔬🧑‍💻 Tired of going back and forth between GUIs and code for your 3D image analysis needs? Would you like to keep your focus in one place (notebook), without sacrificing interactivity? Here’s a tool that can help!

Implications for protecting against cognitive impairment following #HeadInjury👇 doi.org/10.1172/JCI199… Here, Tao Li @taoli Michael T. Heneka @michael_heneka Sergio Castro-Gomez @CastroGomezSerg & team find the inflammasome adaptor ASC drives long-lasting brain inflammation and cognitive problems after mild head injury in a closed-head injury model. The figure shows skeletonized activated microglia (Iba1+ cells) following closed head injury, with mice lacking ASC show showing preservation of morphological features, particularly at later time points.

Microglia respond to and induce anxiety and grooming in mice using calcium signaling nature.com/articles/s4138…

Astrocytic Sox9 overexpression in Alzheimer’s disease mouse models promotes Aβ plaque phagocytosis and preserves cognitive function | Nature Neuroscience nature.com/articles/s4159…

Remodeling synaptic connections via engineered neuron-astrocyte interactions nature.com/articles/s4146…

I am very happy to share that our paper is now published in @Nature 😊 Cell-type-targeted mitochondrial transplantation rescues cell degeneration. nature.com/articles/s4158… @IOB_ch (1/6)

#JNeurosci: Khabbaz, Pradhan et al. show that one dose of dexmedetomidine in mice can quickly & safely lower body temperature after spinal cord injury, creating a protective “pharmacological hypothermia” without the equipment normally required for cooling. doi.org/10.1523/JNEURO…