@article {70309,
	title = {Brain-wide hierarchical and sexually dimorphic tuning for social vocalizations},
	journal = {bioRxiv},
	year = {2026},
	month = {2026 Mar 04},
	abstract = {<p>Acoustic communication is widespread among vertebrates and central to social behavior. Yet how brain-wide circuits identify conspecific signals and distinguish acoustic elements with different, often sex-specific social valence remains poorly understood. Here we present the first whole-brain analysis of neuronal responses to conspecific vocalisations in vertebrates, using the transparent fish Danionella cerebrum. Combining volumetric calcium imaging with playbacks probing the stimulus space of the natural sound repertoire, we uncover an unexpectedly early and specialized processing hierarchy: hindbrain nuclei already segregate vocalization-like pulse trains from tones, midbrain regions sharpen these representations and extract temporal features that define vocalization type, and the central posterior thalamic nucleus responds selectively to conspecific vocalization rates and thus acts as a gate for social sounds. Male and female brains share this early feature code but diverge in diencephalic and telencephalic regions, where identical acoustic features evoke sex-specific population activity patterns that parallel dimorphic behavior. Together, our results provide the first cellular-resolution, brain-wide account of social sound processing in a vertebrate, from early categorical segregation to thalamic gating and sex-specific population responses in social circuits.</p>
},
	doi = {10.64898/2026.03.04.709502},
	url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2026/03/04/2026.03.04.709502},
	author = {Henninger, Jorg and Hoffmann, Maximilian and Kadobianskyi, Mykola and Veith, Johannes and Berlage, Caroline and Groneberg, Antonia and Markov, Daniil and Schulze, Lisanne and Svanidze, Ana and Maler, Leonard and Judkewitz, Benjamin}
}
@article {70084,
	title = {Imaging cellular activity simultaneously across all organs of a vertebrate reveals body-wide circuits},
	journal = {bioRxiv},
	year = {2025},
	month = {2025 August 22},
	abstract = {<p>All cells in an animal collectively ensure, moment-to-moment, the survival of the whole organism in the face of environmental stressors1,2. Physiology seeks to elucidate the intricate network of interactions that sustain life, which often span multiple organs, cell types, and timescales, but a major challenge lies in the inability to simultaneously record time-varying cellular activity throughout the entire body.We developed WHOLISTIC, a method to image second-timescale, time-varying intracellular dynamics across cell-types of the vertebrate body. By advancing and integrating volumetric fluorescence microscopy, machine learning, and pancellular transgenic expression of calcium sensors in transparent young Danio rerio (zebrafish) and adult Danionella, the method enables real-time recording of cellular dynamics across the organism. Calcium is a universal intracellular messenger, with a large array of cellular processes depending on changes in calcium concentration across varying time-scales, making it an ideal proxy of cellular activity3.Using this platform to screen the dynamics of all cells in the body, we discovered unexpected responses of specific cell types to stimuli, such as chondrocyte reactions to cold, meningeal responses to ketamine, and state-dependent activity, such as oscillatory ependymal-cell activity during periods of extended motor quiescence. At the organ scale, the method uncovered pulsating traveling waves along the kidney nephron. At the multi-organ scale, we uncovered muscle synergies and independencies, as well as muscle-organ interactions. Integration with optogenetics allowed us to all-optically determine the causal direction of brain-body interactions. At the whole-organism scale, the method captured the rapid brainstem-controlled redistribution of blood flow across the body.Finally, we advanced Whole-Body Expansion Microscopy4 to provide ground-truth molecular and ultrastructural anatomical context, explaining the spatiotemporal structure of activity captured by WHOLISTIC. Together, these innovations establish a new paradigm for systems biology, bridging cellular and organismal physiology, with broad implications for both fundamental research and drug discovery.</p>
},
	doi = {10.1101/2025.08.20.670374},
	url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2025/08/22/2025.08.20.670374.1},
	author = {Ruetten, Virginia M. S. and Zheng, Wei and Siwanowicz, Igor and Mensh, Brett D. and Eddison, Mark and Hu, Amy and Chi, Yunfeng and Lemire, Andrew L. and Guo, Caiying and Kadobianskyi, Mykola and Renz, Marc and Lelek-Greskovic, Sara and He, Yisheng and Close, Kari and Ihrke, Gudrun and Dev, Aparna and Petruncio, Alyson and Wan, Yinan and Engert, Florian and Fishman, Mark C. and Judkewitz, Benjamin and Rubinov, Mikail and Keller, Philipp J. and Satou, Chie and Yu, Guoqiang and Tillberg, Paul W. and Sahani, Maneesh and Ahrens, Misha B.}
}
