jordan jordan jordan
@jordan
making computers better using brains and making brains better using computers. computational neuro and dumb little web apps sticking a steam wand directly into my brain and frothing it like a cappuccino at @kordinglab. senior research scientist at JHU/APL
for example, here's a hologram I carved of Suzanne from @blender.org . like doing File ⟩ Print in Blender, but with a bajillion other steps :) #penplotter #creativecode #blender #blender3d
these are some blender-ass conference snacks #blender #blender3d @blender.org #blenderguru
oh wtf @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social, I searched for four papers in five minutes while writing a grant and that gets me banned??
Bonus video! Poke it for yourself: neuroglancer.bossdb.io#!https://sho... #sciart #neuroscience
wow I totally thought this was a 2x cuddle buddy but it turns out to be a triple cuddle buddy too!! neuroglancer.bossdb.io#!https://sho... (Am I supposed to NSFW tag this..?)
In any case. Thank you for joining me on this little #academicsky journey :) brain is awesome!
Finally, I want to return to those cuddle buddies that inspired me ages ago. Here's what it looks like to sneak "inside" a soma of a TRIPLE(!!) cuddle buddy. When you look "up" at the surface of the cell, it's dominated by contact with other neurons. Clearly important! But why?
Here's a beautiful shot of a single dendritic spine (black). It has ~3 synaptic partners (blue). But it has nearly TWENTY contact partners (red), which could be electrically or chemically influencing it! (thank you @blender.org for making it so easy to create videos like this ❤️)
And it's just... always true. EVERY synapse is like this. Glia are EVERYWHERE. Here's the same synapse in two views; the glia (green) surrounds the synapse, and could foreseeably tune/train/kill it. HOT TAKE: I think big chunks of learning & memory will turn out to be mainly driven by this :)
For our next trick: Does that glial network touch synapses specifically? Another resounding YES: PRACTICALLY EVERY SYNAPSE has a glial cell within 1µm, and near the synaptic site, almost ALL of the surrounding tissue is glial. Glam-shot: a synapse's microenvironent is dominated by an astrocyte :)
The answer is... holy crap YES. Here, I've shaded in red the astrocytes that participate in this network. Yep. It's literally EVERYWHERE. If we look at the nuclei of these astrocytes, they're perfectly uniformly distributed in the mouse visual cortex too!
The answer, INCREDIBLY, is... basically ZERO! *A neuron already touches virtually every neuron that comes within ~10µm of its cell membrane.* omg!
ok cool so let's take each neuron (blue), and draw increasing radii around it: 0.5µm (green), 1µm (yellow), 2µm... all the way up to 10µm. That's actually quite a lot of distance! ~1000x more volume than the neuron itself. So how many new partners are there in that HUGE halo we don't already touch?
It also turns out that different cell types have different "fingerprints" of their volume to surface-area relationships. Unsurprisingly, you can immediately tell who's a neuron and who's glia (green = glia, blue = neuron), and in fact different cell types even have their own "sub-fingerprint"!
Our first result was super obvious: in mice, CONTACT networks (the #contactome) are 5-10 times as dense as the synaptic connectome.
More generally, if you knew every cell a neuron touches, would you know something new beyond its synaptic #contactome? How many other cells does a neuron touch, anyway? Here was our first exploration: a single pyramidal cell (cyan), followed by all its synaptic partners, and then all its contacts:
I first got excited about this ~8y ago when I started seeing a pattern in #microns and other datasets at bossdb.org @alleninstitute.org @bcmhouston.bsky.social @princeton.edu @mit.edu Usually neuron cell bodies are spread out... But every so often, you get what I call "cuddle buddies". wtf?
so I just realized I forgot to #skeetprint my Contactomes paper... (is that what we're calling it?) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @kordinglab.bsky.social @dacolon.bsky.social smithneurallab.weebly.com @jhuapl.bsky.social #academicsky #preprint #neuroscience
this is fun!! I just spent a ton of hours making this animation for my dissertation defense in @blender.org, I wish I had known about this a little sooner 😆 mine is of course not real data...
excited to announce it's time for me to defend my dissertation! come hang :) april 21, 2026 1:30pm EDT gaulton auditorium at UPenn or Zoom jordan.matelsky.com/phd
someone's working late to fix the production string replacement fail tonight at Strava I'll bet
the base64 encoding of this image is also this image blog.jordan.matelsky.com/bb64/
I remember the days before @blender.org even had a "save before closing" :)
"Iguanodon Hamsa" in gold ink, to celebrate a very exciting day for iguanodons everywhere. #penplotter #fossilfriday #paleoart combo post!
#penplotter art inspired by Josef Albers — took me forever to figure out how to turn this concept into a procedural algorithm :)