I was very excited when our latest research paper came out, after all, I was confident our 30-year-long search for the sites of plasticity in the form of motor learning we study was coming to an end. In this work, we were fairly confident that underlying the type of learning we study was a novel form of plasticity in a very specific set of motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the flies we use for our research.

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.

The first conference after the Sars CoV2 pandemic! We’re headed for Paris, France tomorrow and our lab will present two posters, the work of graduate student Andreas Ehweiner and postdoc Radostina Lyutova.

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.

This year we have two posters at the SfN meeting in sunny San Diego, Ca. The first poster is on Sunday morning, Nov.

Last week, Elizabeth Pennisi asked me to comment on the recent paper from Schreiweis et al. entitled “Humanized FoxP2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance”. Since I don’t know how much, if anything, of my answers to her questions will end up in her article, I thought I might expand my answer into a post about this very interesting work.

This is the story behind our work on the function of the FoxP gene in the fruit fly Drosophila (more background info). As so many good things, it started with beer. Troy Zars and I were having a beer on one of the ICN evenings, I think it was in Vancouver in 2007. I had recently learned about the conserved role of FoxP2 in songbirds, out of one of the labs in Berlin, where I was based at the time.

See this post with the associated press releases on brembs.net. The F orkhead B ox P2 (FOXP2) gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We have discovered that a relative of this gene in fruit flies, dFoxP , is necessary for a type of learning called operant self-learning, which resembles some aspects of language learning.

The data clearly show that publications in Cell , Nature or Science ( CNS for short), on average, cannot be distinguished from other publications, be it by methodology, reproducibility or other measures of quality. Even their citation advantage, while statistically significant, is so small that it is practically negligible.

*During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.