Hooray!!!! Huge congratulations Zach!!!

Amazing work as usual Abhilasha! 🤩

Huge congratulations to the new cohort of Fellows-to-Faculty awardees!! 👏

Thank you Bree! Hope you’re doing well

Congratulations!!!! Such a huge milestone, it’s time to celebrate!! Also how are we still in perfect synch with these things, even after 6 years 😂

BiPOLES really came in clutch at exactly the right moment for us. Thank you for making it available!

Couldn't have done it without your help 😍

This is also probably the moment to share that I am officially on the job market! If you are looking to add a neuroscientist with expertise in hippocampal physiology (especially interneurons), oscillations, epilepsy, and aging to your dept hit me up! I have funding!
(www.zoechristensonwickphd.com)

And a very special shout out to my co-first author Paul Philipsberg. He doesn’t internet, but he’s a phenomenal grad student in the lab and the literal wizard behind PhaSER. If you use PhaSER (github.com/ShumanLab/Ph...), you have him to thank!

And it all couldn’t have happened without the incredible team of people that worked on this over the last 6 years. Words cannot convey how amazing a group this is.

@susieyufeng.bsky.social @laurenmvetere.bsky.social @denisejcai.bsky.social @tristanshuman.bsky.social

Side note: if you can find an opto-tagged SOM+ cell in the epileptic dentate, I will personally give you $5. 💰

There are tons of cool nuggets in this preprint: how to do pilo in transgenic mice (it’s complicated!), really interesting sex differences in epilepsy, why stimulation alone doesn’t work to shift phase locking, etc etc…

Finally, we tested if altered PV+ phase locking was sufficient to induce seizure susceptibility in otherwise healthy animals, by shifting PV+ spiking to the peak of theta… And it was!

Then we applied this manipulation to test if, in epilepsy, restoring PV+ interneuron spiking to the trough of theta could reduce seizure susceptibility. It did!

(This is the part of the paper where I had to summarize many. many. many. years of work in 2 sentences):

PhaSER works best to shift the phase locking of interneurons when coupled with bidirectional manipulations (thank you, BiPOLES!!!) 👏 @simwieg.bsky.social @johvierock.bsky.social

Now, there’s a long list of disorders with altered phase locking. But finding the causal role of this change in spike timing was impossible due to limitations in technology.

Enter, 〰️PhaSER 〰️: a closed-loop system that delivers phase-locked manipulations to ongoing oscillations.

.@tristanshuman.bsky.social and @susieyufeng.bsky.social previously showed that DG interneurons have dramatically altered theta phase locking in epilepsy. Not only did we replicate this (2x!), we found that PV+ interneurons specifically showed theta phase locking deficits in epilepsy.