About

Scott Juntti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland. He was born and raised in Minnesota, obtained his B.S. degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Francisco, where he studied behavioral neuroendocrinology. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University in the lab of Russ Fernald, focusing on circuits for reproductive behaviors in cichlid fish. His research interests center on understanding how the brain produces social behaviors and how these behaviors evolve. The Juntti Lab, established at the University of Maryland in 2017, investigates essential yet variable behaviors such as mating, aggression, and parenting using cichlid fish as a model system. His work leverages the diversity of social systems and communication methods in over 2000 species of cichlids, including auditory, chemical, and visual cues, to explore the neural circuits underlying social behaviors and their evolution. His research employs pharmacologic and genetic tools, including CRISPR, to manipulate these species and causally link genotype to phenotype, ultimately aiming to elucidate how neural circuits function and evolve to generate diverse social behaviors.

Research topics

• Biology
• Zoology
• Evolutionary biology
• Computer science
• Fishery

Selected publications

• Cichlid fishes

  Nature Methods · 2025-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A pheromone receptor in cichlid fish mediates attraction to females but inhibits male parental care

  Current Biology · 2024-08-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pheromone Perception in Fish: Mechanisms and Modulation by Internal Status

  Integrative and Comparative Biology · 2023-06-01 · 16 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior author

  Pheromones are chemical signals that facilitate communication between animals, and most animals use pheromones for reproduction and other forms of social behavior. The identification of key ligands and olfactory receptors used for pheromonal communication provides insight into the sensory processing of these important cues. An individual's responses to pheromones can be plastic, as physiological status modulates behavioral outputs. In this review, we outline the mechanisms for pheromone sensation and highlight physiological mechanisms that modify pheromone-guided behavior. We focus on hormones, which regulate pheromonal communication across vertebrates including fish, amphibians, and rodents. This regulation may occur in peripheral olfactory organs and the brain, but the mechanisms remain unclear. While this review centers on research in fish, we will discuss other systems to provide insight into how hormonal mechanisms function across taxa.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cichlid genome modification - Malawi cichlids v1

  2023-08-16

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Here we provide a microinjection protocol for the modification of cichlid fish via CRISPR or transgenesis. This is our forked version of the protocol provided by Scott Juntti (https://www.protocols.io/view/cichlid-genome-modification-cj5wuq7e), modified for our Lake Malawi cichlid species for both NHEJ knock-outs and HDR knock-ins These protocols accompany a review article on cichlid genome editing which contains more general considerations (link will be provided when available).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author response for "Genome editing in East African cichlids and tilapias: state-of-the-art and future directions"

  2023-10-26

  peer-review
  PublisherDOI

• Video Data: Spatiotemporal visual statistics of aquatic environments in the natural habitats of zebrafish

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-01-18

  datasetOpen access

  Video dataset accompanying " Spatiotemporal visual statistics of aquatic environments in the natural habitats of zebrafish." See accompanying Github repository for more documentation and analysis code.

  PublisherDOI

• Neuroethology in The Age of Gene Editing: New Tools And Novel Insights into The Molecular And Neural Basis of Behavior

  Integrative and Comparative Biology · 2023-06-16 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Synopsis Fifty years ago, animal models studied in the lab were highly diverse, and biological insights were derived from experiments in many species. However, the pursuit of mechanistic explanations in organismal biology led to a shift in the species most commonly studied. The advent of genetic manipulations and economies of scale promoted the consolidation of research into fewer species (eg, Drosophila melanogaster, Mus musculus, Danio rerio, Caenorhabditis elegans). As a result, the tremendous variety of evolutionary adaptations across species provided insights into ultimate causes of evolution, but their proximate mechanisms have been understudied in recent decades. Within the last decade, developments in genome modifications have enabled functional genetic studies in a wide variety of species. This special issue combines papers derived from a symposium organized at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference in January 2023 in Austin, Texas. The symposium entitled “Neuroethology in the age of gene editing: New tools and novel insights into the molecular and neural basis of behavior” was convened to catalyze the transfer of knowledge and skills from researchers who have applied genome modification technologies in new model organisms to scientists who would like to bring these approaches to their own research programs. We highlight this work here, and suggest how the future of biological knowledge will be informed by these powerful experiments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spatiotemporal visual statistics of aquatic environments in the natural habitats of zebrafish

  Scientific Reports · 2023-07-25 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Animal sensory systems are tightly adapted to the demands of their environment. In the visual domain, research has shown that many species have circuits and systems that exploit statistical regularities in natural visual signals. The zebrafish is a popular model animal in visual neuroscience, but relatively little quantitative data is available about the visual properties of the aquatic habitats where zebrafish reside, as compared to terrestrial environments. Improving our understanding of the visual demands of the aquatic habitats of zebrafish can enhance the insights about sensory neuroscience yielded by this model system. We analyzed a video dataset of zebrafish habitats captured by a stationary camera and compared this dataset to videos of terrestrial scenes in the same geographic area. Our analysis of the spatiotemporal structure in these videos suggests that zebrafish habitats are characterized by low visual contrast and strong motion when compared to terrestrial environments. Similar to terrestrial environments, zebrafish habitats tended to be dominated by dark contrasts, particularly in the lower visual field. We discuss how these properties of the visual environment can inform the study of zebrafish visual behavior and neural processing and, by extension, can inform our understanding of the vertebrate brain.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Video Data: Spatiotemporal visual statistics of aquatic environments in the natural habitats of zebrafish

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-01-18

  datasetOpen access

  Video dataset accompanying " Spatiotemporal visual statistics of aquatic environments in the natural habitats of zebrafish." See accompanying Github repository for more documentation and analysis code.

  PublisherDOI

• Genome editing in East African cichlids and tilapias: state-of-the-art and future directions

  Open Biology · 2023-11-01 · 11 citations

  reviewOpen access

  African cichlid fishes of the Cichlidae family are a group of teleosts important for aquaculture and research. A thriving research community is particularly interested in the cichlid radiations of the East African Great Lakes. One key goal is to pinpoint genetic variation underlying phenotypic diversification, but the lack of genetic tools has precluded thorough dissection of the genetic basis of relevant traits in cichlids. Genome editing technologies are well established in teleost models like zebrafish and medaka. However, this is not the case for emerging model organisms, such as East African cichlids, where these technologies remain inaccessible to most laboratories, due in part to limited exchange of knowledge and expertise. The Cichlid Science 2022 meeting (Cambridge, UK) hosted for the first time a Genome Editing Workshop, where the community discussed recent advances in genome editing, with an emphasis on CRISPR/Cas9 technologies. Based on the workshop findings and discussions, in this review we define the state-of-the-art of cichlid genome editing, share resources and protocols, and propose new possible avenues to further expand the cichlid genome editing toolkit.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Conference: Biology in the Age of Gene Editing: New Tools and Novel Insights into Organismal Biology and the Neural Basis of Behavior

  NSF · $13k · 2022–2023

• NIH Grant F32HD071755

  NIH · $156k · 2015

• Dissecting sex hormone effects on genes, neurons, and behavior using cichlid fish

  NIH · $1.9M · 2021–2026

• EDGE: Expanding the functional genetics toolkit to link genes to phenotypes in cichlid fish

  NSF · $300k · 2018–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Russell D. Fernald

  Stanford University

  16 shared

• Nicholas C. Guilbeault

  The Scarborough Hospital

  14 shared

• Tod R. Thiele

  The Scarborough Hospital

  14 shared

• Eric A. Miska

  University of Cambridge

  12 shared

• Venkatesh K. Subramanian

  Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

  12 shared

• M. Emília Santos

  University of Cambridge

  9 shared

• Bethan Clark

  University of Cambridge

  9 shared

• Alan Smith

  University of KwaZulu-Natal

  8 shared

Labs

• Juntti LabPI