Fitzpatrick Laboratory

Pulsed #lasers integrated with #cryoEM: @FitzpatrickLab @ColumbiaBiochem @ZuckermanBrain postdoc Daniel Du aims to boost contrast for near-atomic detail in #cryoET @ChanZuckerberg zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/making-world-s… zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/science-life-d… elifesciences.org/reviewed-prepr…

A trillionth of a second: How lasers may sharpen next-gen cryo-ET microscopy phys.org/news/2026-02-t… via @physorg_com

New @CellCellPress paper from Bergles lab at Johns Hopkins just built the most comprehensive map of brain myelin ever made — every oligodendrocyte, across the entire mouse brain, across the lifespan. The scale: >10 million cells per brain, terabyte-scale 3D lightsheet volumes, registered to the Allen Brain Atlas across 417 regions from 2 months to 2+ years of age. The technical stack: Custom tissue clearing (CUBIC-L + SHIELD + uRIMS with 40% urea) to preserve endogenous fluorescence. 3D Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation — not just semantic, instance — so it can distinguish individual cells within dense clusters at scale via overlapping sliding windows. Vision Transformer to classify newly-formed vs. mature oligodendrocytes using soma morphology. All cross-referenced against Allen ISH transcriptomics and MICrONS serial EM. What they found: Oligodendrocyte density varies 10,000-fold across brain regions. Left-right hemispheres: r=0.99. Sex: no significant difference. Strain: matters. The brain never stops myelinating. New oligodendrocytes are still being generated in 2-year-old mice. Prefrontal cortex L6 shows the fastest rates of new myelination into old age — the circuits for executive function keep rewiring throughout life. After demyelination, L4 sensory cortex is the most resilient — oligodendrocytes survive at higher rates. The hippocampus loses nearly everything and barely recovers. Degree of injury doesn't predict rate of recovery. These are independent axes. The Alzheimer's result is the most surprising: Dense-core plaques dominate in cortex and hippocampus. Diffuse/small-core plaques dominate in white matter fiber tracts. Old assumption: diffuse plaques are "less toxic." The data says the opposite — small plaques in fiber tracts cause more myelin loss per plaque than dense-core plaques in gray matter. Plaque load and oligodendrocyte loss are essentially uncorrelated (ρ=0.22). The damage is plaque-type and location specific, not load-dependent. For MS and AD research: you can't read off white matter injury from gray matter plaque burden. The pathology in fiber tracts is running on different rules. Data: bossdb.org/project/xu2024 Paper: cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

Ahmed Zewail, the founder of femtochemistry, developed methods for studying chemical reactions in detail. He was awarded the 1999 chemistry prize "for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy." Discover more about his life and research: bit.ly/2RyXPnj

The interplay between biomolecular assembly and phase separation. 🔗 elifesciences.org/articles/93003…

Protective ApoE variants support neuronal function by effluxing oxidized phospholipids: Neuron cell.com/neuron/fulltex…

Neuroscientists are always looking for new tools that can bring the brain into sharper focus. For postdoc Daniel Du, that means shooting lasers at state-of-the-art microscopes to take better snapshots of molecules that are the building blocks of the brain: zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/science-life-d… #scilife

How do you make one of the best microscopes in biology even better? Postdoc Daniel Du of the Fitzpatrick lab zapped electrons with a laser. The new research in @eLife with @Cornell's Maxson lab promises improved close-up snapshots of the brain: zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/making-world-s…

Amazing paper from @PhilHolliger science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Excited to share our latest study published in @CellCellPress !! We uncovered that a single oncolytic virus injection can ignite deep, persistent T cell immunity in glioblastoma, lasting months to years. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Researchers at UCLA show you don’t need a dedicated cryo-EM to get world-class results. Using an adapted entry-level TEM, they achieved 1.95 Å apoferritin—comparable to top-tier systems—pointing to a more accessible future for cryo-EM. Read more: doi.org/10.1093/mam/oz…

A triple-node heart-brain neuroimmune loop underlying myocardial infarction: Cell cell.com/cell/fulltext/…

AlphaGenome is out in @nature today along with model weights! 🧬 📄 Paper: nature.com/articles/s4158… 💻 Weights: github.com/google-deepmin… Getting here wasn’t a straight path. We sat down @googledeepmind to discuss the story behind the model, paper & API: youtu.be/V8lhUqKqzUc

Central Park, New York

Central Park, New York

Brooklyn, New York

NEW ISSUE: Read the latest content on HSV encephalitis, autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease, acute ischaemic stroke, vaccination and dementia, prion diseases, and more at: thelancet.com/journals/laneu…

Charles Barchet et al.: Explicit correction of severely non-uniform distributions of cryo-EM views #CryoEM #3DReconstruction #ViewFrequency ... #IUCr journals.iucr.org/paper?S2059798…

This *fundamental* study provides new evidence of a change in how microglia survey neurons during the chronic phase of neurodegeneration. #Neuroscience elifesciences.org/articles/10765…

3 papers in Cell today exploring the mechanistic connection between Epstein-Barr virus and multiple sclerosis #MultipleSclerosis cell.com/cell/fulltext/… cell.com/cell/fulltext/… cell.com/cell/fulltext/…