Rogue Scholar Posts

language
Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

It was my freshman year, 1991. I was enthusiastic to finally be learning about biology, after being forced to waste a year in the German army’s compulsory service at the time. Little did I know that it was the same year a research paper was published that would guide the direction of my career to this day, more than 30 years later. Many of the links in this post will go to old web pages I created while learning about this research.

Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

It’s the time of the year again where 30,000 neuroscientists head to the US to talk neuroscience. This year the big annual conference is in Washington, DC, one of the three cities able to host this large event. Our first poster will be up on Tuesday morning and shows results from operant self-stimulation experiments using optogenetics and dopaminergic neurons.

Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

I just sent the poster for this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting to the printer. As our graduate student is preparing his defense and our postdoc did not get a visa (no thanks, US!), we just have a single poster this year and I will present it myself on Monday, November 14, 2022, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM, on poster board WW53.

Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

The FoxP gene family comprises a set of transcription factors that gained fame because of their involvement in the acquisition of speech and language. While early hypotheses circulated about its function as a ‘learning gene’, a simultaneous “motor-hypothesis” stipulated that the gene may be more of a motor learning gene, involved in different kinds of motor learning, one of which is speech acquisition.

Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

Tomorrow we travel to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and our diligent scientists have already printed their posters! Ottavia Palazzo will present her work on genome editing the FoxP locus of Drosophila with anatomical and behavioral characterizations of the various transgenic lines she has created.

Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

On the occasion of the first “BigDataDay” at our university, I have summarized on the below poster our two main efforts to automate the publication of our tiny raw data. On the left is our project automating Buridan data deposition at FigShare using the ROpenSci plugin and the consequence of just sending the links to the data and the evaluation code to a publisher, instead of pixel-based figures, when submitting a paper.

Published in bjoern.brembs.blog
Author Björn Brembs

For the last few years, we have been working on the development of new Drosophila flight simulators. Now, finally, we are reaching a stage where we are starting to think about how to store the data we’ll be capturing both with Open Science in mind, but particularly keeping in mind that this will likely be the final major overhaul of this kind of data until I retire in 20 years.