About

About Fons Voyage

Fons Voyage is the lab notebook of the Goff Lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — a slow-moving stream of dispatches from the neurogenic niche, the parts of the developing and adult brain where new neurons are still being born.

We write here about:

• Cells. Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics of the developing and adult mammalian nervous system — what cells are there, what they are doing, and how they got that way.
• Sequences. Computational methods, pipelines, benchmarks, and the occasional bioinformatics yak-shave that we couldn't quite justify putting in a paper but want to write down before we forget.
• Cephalopods. Because they deserve their own bullet, and because comparative neurobiology is more fun with eight arms.

The name

Fons is the Latin for source or spring — a fitting word for a lab that studies where new neurons come from. Voyage is what we do once we've left port: follow the current, sample the depths, and write down what we find.

What to expect

Posts will skew toward the in-between work that doesn't fit cleanly in a paper — methods notes, exploratory analyses, conference recaps, reading-group writeups, and (occasionally) finished work with figures and code you can actually run. Some posts are short field notes; others are long-form notebooks with embedded data and plots.

We aim for one or two posts a month, give or take a grant deadline. There is no editorial calendar; this is a working notebook, not a magazine.

Following along

• RSS feed — the calmest way to follow.
• Archive — everything we've posted, in reverse chronological order.
• Categories and tags — fill out over time as the corpus grows.

The lab

The Goff Lab studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms of mammalian neurogenesis using single-cell and spatial genomics. We work on the developing cortex, the adult subventricular zone, and assorted comparative-neuroscience side projects.

Find us at the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins, or on the lab website.

Authorship

Posts are written by lab members — students, postdocs, staff, and the PI. By default authorship lives at the top of each post; if a post is unsigned, you can assume it's collective.

Contributing & corrections

This is an open notebook. If you find a mistake, want to suggest a correction, or have a follow-up question:

• Use the comments at the bottom of each post — they run on giscus and require a GitHub account.
• Open an issue on the site repo.
• Or just email us at the address in the README.

Colophon

The site is built with Nikola, the theme is a fork of bootblog4 dressed in a deep-ocean palette, and the source lives on GitHub. The underwater feel is mostly a stack of radial gradients pretending to be caustic light, anchored to the viewport so the bottom of the screen is always the deepest.