Michael Brecht

The paper shows that somatosensory neuron repertoires in mammals diversify through changes to conserved neuron types, enabling adaptation to different habitats and body forms.

The paper characterizes the molecular architecture of somatic spines in the lateral septum across developmental stages using imaging techniques and cultured models.

This study identifies a fast-onset, body-part-specific stickiness response system in rats, driven by forepaw skin afferents and involving specific behaviors and neural responses.

Scalar keypoint aggregates matched Keypoint-MoSeq, VAME, SimBA and A-SOiD at discriminating eight drug-dose treatments across 314 mouse open-field recordings; social context did not improve recall.

This study uses motion sequencing to analyze how social context affects mouse behavior, finding that a minority of behavioral units change in response to spatial proximity, not direct social contact.

The paper investigates the sensory mechanisms and afferents involved in the rat pup transport response, identifying anterior neck grasping and loss of ground contact as triggers for calming and postural adjustments.

The paper maps myelin stripes in elephant trigeminal nuclei to trunk folds, revealing structural organization and differences between Asian and African elephants.

This study investigates how rats respond to water spraying by analyzing fur changes, behavior, and drying processes using thermal imaging.

This study shows that long supraorbital whiskers in rats are specialized for detecting airflow, influencing behavior through biomechanical and neural mechanisms.

The paper quantifies synaptic characteristics in the Etruscan shrew's cortex, finding high synaptic density and similar organization to humans despite significant differences in brain size and synapse number.

This study investigates tickle contagion in rats, finding that trunk somatosensory neurons respond to both direct and witnessed tickling, with mirrored responses driving contagious laughter.

The paper models the rat barrel cortex with a network of neurons and shows that a differentiator circuit can reliably detect single-neuron stimulation, aligning with experimental behavioral responses.

The paper shows that perirhinal cortex input to neocortical layer 1 is critical for early memory formation through dendritic calcium elevation and burst firing in layer 5 pyramidal neurons.

This study investigates neural representations of home direction in rats, finding no home-vector cells but grid cell distortion near the home cage.

The paper investigates how social facial touch in rats modulates cortical activity, showing that both touch and partner sex influence neuron responses, with sex differences in network activity patterns.

This study identifies two subicular principal cell types based on burst firing patterns and shows that sparsely bursting cells encode spatial information more effectively.

This study shows that the estrus-cycle modulates cortical inhibition in female rats by altering fast-spiking interneuron activity via estrogen receptor β.