A vagal reflex to blood volume changes in the heart involves PIEZO2 and helps to stabilize blood pressure in an upright posture and after blood loss.

Two postdoctoral researchers affiliated with MCB have been awarded highly competitive Postdoctoral Pioneer Fellowships from the Harvard Brain Initiative (HBI), recognizing innovative projects that spa...

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Surabhi Sreenivas, an MCB postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Maxim Prigozhin has been awarded a three-year American Diabetes Association Postdoctoral Fellowship to study how the liver regulates […]

The dorsal horn of the mammalian spinal cord is organized into laminae where each layer is populated by different neuron types, has distinctive circuit connections, and plays specialized roles in beha...

A new paper in Nature Methods (PDF) from the labs of MCB’s Jeff Lichtman and Aravinthan Samuel, of the department of physics and Center for Brain Science, introduces […]

Harvard College senior Fajr Khan, a neuroscience concentrator whose work spans maternal mental health, child psychology, and the biological foundations of psychiatric illness, has been selected as a [...

Nancy Kleckner, the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology, has been awarded the 2025 Charles E. Helmstetter Prize Lifetime Achievement Award (PDF) in recognition of her groundbreaking research ...

Parenting behavior emerges from hormonally sensitive circuits, but how distinct circuit components are affected by, and contribute to, sex and state dependent changes in infant caregiving remains uncl...

Long before flowers painted the planet in brilliant colors, some of Earth’s earliest plants were glowing—not with pigment, but with heat. A new study from the lab of […]

A long-standing mystery in microbiome research—how a gut-bacterial toxin physically damages human DNA—has finally been solved through a close collaboration led in part by researchers in the Victoria [...

When Ashley Johnson stepped into the role of Interim Program Administrator for the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) and Chemical and Physical Biology (CPB) concentrations this past May, […]