Thanks Tallie for your support and inspiration 🙏

Thanks @gozziale.bsky.social !

Follow @dzelmanoff.bsky.social who led this work and just joined the bsky party!

Congrats Noa, Yuval and the team! Beautiful work!

And to Shari Ross for the beautiful drawings

Many thanks to my amazing team at @weizmanninstitute.bsky.social, our colleagues at the Dept. of Brain Sciences and at the Dept. of Molecular Neuroscience and the generous support of @erc.europa.eu and the NIH BRAIN Initiative

And this article at the Transmitter by Claudia Lopez: www.thetransmitter.org/oxytocin/oxy...

See also this really nice write-up by @bellonec.bsky.social : www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This study was led by my fantastic PhD student Daniel Zelmanoff and a wonderful team from the lab. Check out the full paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Using this approach, we were able to show that silencing oxytocin neurons specifically alters the vocal behaviors of pups when they are separated from their dam and littermates, and also alters their vocal behavior upon reunion.

Since optogenetic manipulations are very difficult to perform at such a young age, we devised a new approach that uses our mosquito opsin eOPN3, which is red-shifted and highly light-sensitive, for transcranial silencing of hypothalamic oxytocin cells in freely-behaving pups.

We found that oxytocin neurons are activated during a 3-hour separation from the home cage, and are also transiently recruited during the emission of ultrasonic vocalization bouts.

This study was ignited by the discovery that oxytocin receptors reach peak expression in the brain during early life - both in humans and rodents! In mice, P14-21 and in humans from birth to 3 years. We wondered how oxytocin contributes to behavior at this critical period in an animal's lifetime.

Related to this, I created a starter pack for those interested/involved in Epilepsy research. Many of the DBS folks may also be interested.

go.bsky.app/B8pPi1n