Vincent Costa
@VincentCostaPhd
Neuroscientist exploring how the primate 🧠 learns and decides, while exploiting the consumption of 🍕 and 🥯
26 years after Larry Swanson emphasized “the amygdala is neither a structural or functional unit” we used sn-RNAseq to answer the question: “What is the [primate] amygdala?” Check out the preprint 👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
![VincentCostaPhd's tweet image. 26 years after Larry Swanson emphasized “the amygdala is neither a structural or functional unit” we used sn-RNAseq to answer the question:
“What is the [primate] amygdala?”
Check out the preprint 👇
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GaPv4fYWEAIJbXi.jpg)
Our postdoc Sho Watanabe @alfort_123 giving his talk at @ChEnected @SEED2025. Talking about INvivo tracking of Active Transcriptions (INTACT) or an "in vivo qPCR" and our recent work on primate synthetic serum markers. Links in comments bc algorithm.
Our work with @pablo_tano8 , @HyungGoo_Kim @AtharNMalik @pouget_alex and Nao Uchida exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @Nature nature.com/articles/s4158…
Neuroscientists, please start consulting biostatisticians for your sequencing experiments. You can’t just copy and paste Seurat pipelines for everything.
As @emukamel and Yu point out, #methodsmatter. They are spot on here: nature.com/articles/s4158…
How can you know if gene delivery in a primate worked? Typically through expensive scans or histology. With @VincentCostaPhd and first authors @sangsin_lee and McKenna Romac we made synthetic markers that monitor gene delivery and Cre-dependent expression with a blood test. PDF👇
Update: we successfully sawed off our toe with a butter knife. The results are fantastic and I couldn’t be happier.
Your pesudorandom reminder that nearly everything we know about molecular neuroscience is optimized for mice and that getting anything to work in a primate is akin to sawing off your toe with a dull butterknife.
ATLAS, a rationally designed transsynaptic tracer is out today! Plasmids will soon be available on @Addgene addgene nature.com/articles/s4159… Many thanks to first authors Jackie Rivera and Haoyang Huang, and to collaborators, @blsabatini @Kanoski_Lab @vincentw_weng @beherring
Our BONE paper has been accepted to TMLR. It derives methods for state space inference in non stationary environments, where changes to the DHO can be gradual (eg drift) or sudden (eg change point)
Happy to announce that our paper on (generalised) Bayesian online learning in non-stationary environments has been accepted at @TmlrOrg! 🦴 This is joint work with @l_sbetancourt, A. Shestopaloff, and @sirbayes. arxiv.org/abs/2411.10153
qPCR can measure expression of virtually any gene... in homogenized tissues. Here, we show an "in-vivo qPCR" equivalent, where we measure a sequence-specific transcript with synthetic serum markers and enzyme-based signal amplification. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Hey #ACNP2024 - your resort fee includes 2hrs of free bike rentals 🚲 per day...and there's a Target 🎯 ~5min away, in case you need a snack run (unless you prefer the endless supply of hard boiled eggs each morning 😂)
Sad to see OHSU described by one of its own leaders as no longer a place to do deep research. wweek.com/news/2024/12/0… It has been catastrophically mismanaged in recent years.
Our December issue, featuring a Focus on Single Cell Genomics, is now live! nature.com/neuro/volumes/…
When I was at @OHSUSOM Brian Druker was described to me be a senior faculty member as "the pope of OHSU." When the pope stops believing in an institution & is looking to hit eject you know things are going sideways. wweek.com/news/2024/12/0…
A little late for Thanksgiving but if you have friends and family members curious about anti-obesity medications, this is very easy to digest piece (nailed that pun....still got it) authors.elsevier.com/a/1kCED3QW8S6G…
The Crucial Importance of Nonhuman Primates to Understand Human Brain Function reports.mountsinai.org/article/fbifal…
I am looking forward to coming back to @MIT for Neurotech 2024 tomorrow! I will talk about noninvasive interfacing with the brain, including new projects with our postdoc Sho Watanabe @alfort_123 and collaborators @VincentCostaPhd and Rui Chen (UCI). neurotech.mit.edu