And none of this (with more to come this year! :)) would be possible without the awesome support of Fondation Bettencourt Schueller!

There has never been a better time to study neural circuit development! Are you passionate about the mechanisms underlying wiring specificity? We have exciting projects in the pipeline and are looking for talented colleagues to join our team! Drop me a line if you’re interested!

Thanks to our reviewers whose input helped us significantly improve the manuscript, and to @cellpress.bsky.social for the great experience with the Cell Press Multi-Journal Submission!

In this context, biased adjacency is a contributor in the developmental timeline of synaptic specificity by bringing together the right neurons at the right time and location, thereby restricting partner availability before synaptogenesis. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Given neurons’ intrinsic drive to form synapses, perhaps the establishment of synaptic specificity is best understood as a continuous process of developmental choices where neurons are prevented from connecting with the wrong partners.

Instead, they contribute to synaptic specificity by biasing cellular adjacency—causing neurons to segregate into discrete physical domains and restricting partner availability before synaptogenesis.

We demonstrate that receptor-ligand pairs of the Beat and Side families of cell adhesion molecules, expressed between synaptic partners, are not required for synapse formation.

We now provide a mechanistic understanding of how these interactions shape neural circuit formation, linking these molecules to the cellular interactions they support.

Our study follows Yoo et al. www.cell.com/current-biol..., which first showed that Beat/Side, cell surface adhesion molecules, contribute to synaptic specificity—helping neurons form precise connections with the right partners

In this work, we studied how neurons are organized into layers during development and how this process influences the connections (synapses) they form with each other.

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