Nivedita Sarveswaran

Lots of writing on the cards over the next few months but thoroughly enjoying all the advice and memes I have saved from PhD thesis time. Might start a thread, but for now, keeping this one front and centre

This year’s International 3Rs Prize recognises pioneering human-relevant approaches across immunotherapy, oncology and gene therapy, which enable the replacement of animals and generate new insights into human disease. Read about the winning and highly commended papers: nc3rs.org.uk/news/pioneer...

No one deserves this award more than @ctrue.bsky.social His (and his team’s) tireless work on #Fiji powers the daily research of thousands of scientists. Imagine your daily work without Fiji >.< Yet the work is often thankless. We reach out when things break, rarely when they work.

Hive mind: can anyone recommend a good colocalization analysis tutorial/paper for fluorescence images that would be beginner-friendly? Ideally, it would cover the various coefficients (e.g. Pearson's, Mander's, etc.) and show some examples of applications.

🔍 Does the solution to nerve pain lie within us? This new video explains how the body’s own immune system plays a role in detecting nerve injury and could help in alleviating nerve-related pain – known as neuropathic pain – by targeting damaged nerve fibres. #NeuropathicPain

Excited that our deep dive into the function of 13,403 KCNQ1 variants is now published in @CircAHA! We used 4 multiplexed assays of variant effect (MAVEs) to connect variant effects to ion channel mechanisms and long QT syndrome risk. 🧵

For anyone interested in personal accounts of opioid withdrawal across the centuries, I can also recommend: 📗 In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids, by Travis Reider 📙 Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincy (linked)

Our newest preprint is out! 🥳 Neuroscientists and rheumatologists - this one is for you! I'm also delighted that we seem to have finally found a single molecule apparently capable of inducing peripheral sensitization in cultured neurons - in the absence of any other supporting cells.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Are you working towards independence and looking for a host and mentoring to support your Career Development Fellowship application? The ISMB at Birkbeck are welcoming candidates with an outstanding track record in mechanistic structural and molecular biology. www.ismb.lon.ac.uk/research-fel...

Beaut presentation by @sdesider.bsky.social at @wolfsonsparc.bsky.social refining the early transcriptional cascades controlling sensory neuron subtype specification, some very cool work in the pipeline interacting with our favourite PRDM12 too!

This is just not true. I’m only aware of one phase two trial for neuropathic pain for a nav1.8 inhibitor and it was positive. www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/.... I think there is good reason to believe this class of drugs will work for people with painful neuropathy.

📢Check out our new review, in @bmj.com's Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer! We examine how sensory neural signaling shapes immunotherapy efficacy, and how immunotherapies impinge on sensory neuron biology to promote adverse events. jitc.bmj.com/content/14/1...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #PainResearch

Another super piece by @philipcball.bsky.social! This one on the enduring impact of "Waddington's landscape"! www.quantamagazine.org/how-does-lif...

Do you have thoughts on how whole-genome sequencing should be used in newborn screening? We're doing a survey on Genomic Newborn Screening in Public Health @nihrexeterbrc.bsky.social, and would love to hear a diversity of opinions - no prior knowledge needed! Participate here: tinyurl.com/genomicnbs

Hey #painresearcher wondering where you fit in to today's world of #scicomm? Thanks to the @usasp.bsky.social for inviting me and hosting this webinar next Tues Oct 13 at 9 PT/12 ET Join me! www.usasp.org/event-detail...

Looks like a brilliant meeting for anyone interested in the current drug development landscape for non-opioid based pain therapies - it's an exciting time! non-opioid-pain-therapeutics.com/about-event/

Women report suffering more pain than men, a new global study shows. That was for all pain types measured, & comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need. 🧪🧠 #neuroskyence www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

One reason (among many) to study protists: as a toolbox, nature is unbeatable

This year’s Nobel Prize is a great reminder of something fundamental about science: curiosity-driven research and unexpected angles of attack can reveal principles with implications far beyond the original question. Glad to see this beautifully illustrated through work on a photosynthetic organism!

Why optogenetics deserves the hype www.wiringthebrain.com/2013/09/why-... (a piece I wrote in 2013 explaining how it works and why modulating specific cell types is so key to understanding how neural circuits and systems work)

Too many neuro preprints to keep track of, so I made a monthly ranking of the most-read ones on bioRxiv. Not a measure of quality, just what people are reading. Here's the fresh ranking for September: robertodf.github.io/biorxiv-top/

A must read for anyone interested in pain mechanisms! Sex-specific mechanisms of chronic pain | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

David Shiffman Scientific and Environmental Consulting is proud to introduce an Omega Super Platinum level of open access publishing. For $250,000 I will read your peer-reviewed scientific paper out loud, through a megaphone, to any 5 people of your choice. Anywhere in the world!

Some changes to UKRI funding were announced in the last couple of weeks, read about the potential impact on UK science here 🧪

Tom Banton for England, our player of the match, his maiden 100 and made a nice catch! 🏏

Life lessons from the last 3 years in science: find joy, be brave and stay resilient 💪

In related news, I read a paper from 2001 today (in Nature Genetics). There were 6 figures, but each figure was just one panel of a very simple experiment. What a beautiful world we once had...

For #PainAwarenessMonth, we’re highlighting some of the researchers across our School who are advancing our understanding of pain. Dr David Bulmer studies pain in gastrointestinal diseases and how the gut-brain connection could help improve treatments. 🔗 www.phar.cam.ac.uk/research/bul...

Our latest preprint continues our investigations into spinal mechanisms of human chronic pain! We find no evidence for a loss of neurons in the dorsal horn of donors with chronic lower limb pain, and the ratio of excitatory to inhibitory interneurons also remains consistent between pain states.

Ok, this "there are two separate brains" thing appears to be making the rounds, and I want to be absolutely clear: this is a press office overhyping some perfectly reasonable science that won't come as a surprise to most developmental biologists.

Quiet rest helps with memory consolidation, the process through which newly formed memories become more stable.

And it did not disappoint! Thank you for the welcoming experience to York and the inspiring breadth of mol/cell neurobiology #NeuroBioUK26 - already looking to next time, September 17th 2027!

JCI - Myotonic Muscle Activity Drives a Persistent Pain State Responsive to NaV1.8-directed Analgesics www.jci.org/articles/vie...

We wrote a tutorial guide on voltage imaging, now out in Neuron: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nlgh3BtfH... Indicators, microscopes, and software have all advanced to the point that it's not so hard -- you can now directly watch the electrical activity of neurons in live animals or in culture.

Finally made it to NeuroBio, looking forward to meeting more UK molecular and cellular neuroscientists tomorrow! #NeuroBioUK26

Well deserved! When I was searching for an example of how a discovery about the brain unlocked an entirely new class of therapies (while writing Elusive Cures), orexin is what I pointed to. It doesn't always happen this way. When it does **it's epic** and we should celebrate.

Here is the details from UKRI (I've not yet read) www.ukri.org/news/ukri-mo...

It was great working with students Kun and Ryan and @hannahlong.bsky.social, combing the literature to try and find examples of bona fide disease-causing variants in non-coding elements - promoters, enhancers and silencers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join us on Wed 7 Oct for a packed programme of talks, panels and interactive workshops at #RAREsummit26 - exploring policy, care, health data, partnerships and innovation. 📍 Cambridge or online 🎟️ Programme & tickets: camraredisease.org/raresummit26... #RareDisease #RareConditions

Using iPSC-derived human #neurons gene-edited to express pathogenic #KIF1A variants, @aikenlab.bsky.social, @erikaholzbaur.bsky.social et al. demonstrate that distinct alterations in KIF1A motor function disrupt synaptic development through divergent cellular mechanisms rupress.org/jcb/article/...

New book chapter from @jcornwallscoones.bsky.social & me On GRNs as dynamical systems. Wiring diagrams alone can't predict network behaviour. Understanding developmental patterning needs quantitative, experimentally defined rules for how CREs integrate TF inputs books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&...

Laminin β4 is required for the development of human peripheral sensory neurons Read this Research Article from our special issue #DevSIextracellular by Kenyi Saito-Diaz @kenyisama.bsky.social, Nadja Zeltner and colleagues. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Researchers in the Gracheva @yaleneuro.bsky.social and Bagriantsev labs found that hibernating squirrel mechanosensory neurons—which convert touch sensation into electrical signals—are adapted to survive in low temperatures and retain their signaling capabilities.

We remember biochemist and chemistry laureate Ada Yonath who passed away this week at the age of 87. In 2009, Yonath shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Learn more: https://bit.ly/4kJscDU