Our work made it into the "7 medical breakthroughs that gave us hope in 2023" of #NatGeo – proud! They even chose our image of the #Drosophila larval brain neurons for the header:
In #neuroscience it’s circuit plasticity all the way down:
“Using long-term exposure to high concentrations of geosmin, an indicator of potentially lethal microorganisms, we demonstrate at the single-cell level that the underlying neuronal circuitry undergoes structural changes in the antennal lobe, while higher brain centers remain unaffected. In particular, second-order neurons show neurite extensions and synaptic remodeling after the exposure period, whereas olfactory sensory neurons and glia cells remain unaffected. Flies that were exposed to geosmin tolerate this innately aversive odorant in general choice and oviposition assays. We show that even a highly specific olfactory circuit is plastic and adaptable to environmental changes.”
#Sustainability#lablife
Contemplating energy consumption after my training course on ESD (education for sustainability development): #Drosophila stock keeping require monthly labour, food resources and energy, cryogenic procedure are developing to reduce these, with the recovery rate still improving. For #cell culture lab, do you have a figure on the difference between continuous cell passage VS cryogenics storage? Intuition is the latter is better with energy, but do we have data for this?
How do differentiating cells communicate with progenitors to ensure precise control of organ size? Study of #Drosophila eyes shows that BMP molecule Dpp mediates this feedback by adjusting the rate of progenitor #apoptosis@fcasfer@omeuxeito#PLOSBiologyhttps://plos.io/3uhh5xK
Takashi Kawase has released a #linux version of VVDViewer (https://github.com/JaneliaSciComp/VVDViewer), a powerful volume renderer (#scivis, #sciviz) for #fluorescence#microscopy data. To celebrate, here is a video rendered by VVDViewer as driven by the Linux version of neuVid. The input to neuVid is a high-level description of the video, in this case showing four #drosophila lines from the #HHMIJanelia FlyLight Gen1 MCFO collection. The input text is pretty simple... (1/3)
The #HHMIJanelia FlyEM MANC #connectome is now available on NeuronBridge.janelia.org. #Drosophila#Neuroscience researchers can use this tool to match the MANC electron #microscopy (EM) data against light microscopy (LM) data, like that from the Janelia FlyLight project. A user can interactively examine matches right in the browser by clicking the "View in 3D" button. Interactive views are sharable, too... (1/3)
Really excited to share the lab's first Drosophila paper and it's a big one. Check out our preprint https://shorturl.at/gqrvO where we present the complete neural connectome of an animal circadian clock . 🧵 (1/8) #Drosophila#neuroscience#connectome
The Visualizing Biological Data 2024 workshop (VIZBI), March 13-15 in Los Angeles, looks very interesting. Speakers will discuss visualization in areas like #genetics, #cellBiology and #ecology. Participants can present a poster and lightning talk. Mine will cover neuVid, which simplifies video production with #Blender3D. Here it is showing some #Drosophila neurons from the FlyWire data set, using #AI to parse my natural language description of the video.
"whenever I find a paper I don't understand, I start looking for the PhD thesis based on it. Nine times out of ten, the thesis is vastly more understandable: "obvious" lemmas will have explicit proofs, algorithms will have detailed pseudocode, and the right intuitions and perspectives to take about the topic will be spelled out."
Can relate. A colleague of mine, Stefan Pulver, once mentioned to me the "strategic reserve of Michael Bate's lab PhD student theses" as something of wonder – he was a postdoc in that lab. Huge amounts of data not deemed splashy enough for publication but full of details and caveats and protocols for studies of #Drosophila larvae #neuroscience.
Recent genomic studies show that the parasitic fly Braula evolved within Drosophilidae, flies we know as the workhorses of genetics. See link.
The problem: Braula was named in 1818.
Drosophila was named in 1823.
By the rules of priority, if we organize taxa by their ancestry, then the correct family placement for all these flies, including everyone's precious Drosophila melanogaster, is in Braulidae, not Drosophilidae.
James W. Truman featured in the New Yorker. A warm, lovely piece on his career studying insect metamorphosis, from moths to flies and mosquitoes, and the role and impact of hormones on insect development and behaviour—motivated by his latest work mapping the fate of neurons from larva to adult through pupal stages, and addressing an old question: do associative memories persist through metamorphosis?
The paper:
“Metamorphosis of memory circuits in Drosophila reveals a strategy for evolving a larval brain” Truman et al. 2023 https://elifesciences.org/articles/80594
Fruit fly neuroscience is on fire. Earlier in the year we saw this:
"Hierarchical architecture of dopaminergic circuits enables second-order conditioning in Drosophila" by Yamada et al. 2023 (Aso's group) https://elifesciences.org/articles/79042
"The Drosophila mushroom body comprises a series of dopaminergic compartments, each of which exhibits distinct memory dynamics. We find that a slow and stable memory compartment can serve as an effective ‘teacher’ by instructing other faster and transient memory compartments via a single key interneuron", SMP108.
In larval brain parlance, neuron SMP108 is an FB2N: a second-order feedback neuron, meaning, it is the second hop of the 2-hop polysynaptic pathway from MBONs to DANs. See Eschbach et al. 2020 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-0607-9
An Arrakis sandworm? Not quite: this apparent monster is but the tiny, cute larva of the fruit fly #Drosophila, a menace only to your apples and bananas, and the one organism where we have a solid chance to understand the neural circuit basis of behaviour.
A simple model of a crawling fly maggot, using springs for each body segment, plus one stretch receptor, one motor neuron, and one inhibitory neuron connecting to the adjacent segment. That's all that's needed to reproduce realistic locomotion dynamics of #Drosophila larvae, including turns and reversals of direction.
When I started, I had no idea what I was getting into. When you don't know what you are doing, you first need to get a conceptual grip on your question. Then you need luck that once you have learned how to design your experiments, the results are actually telling u something new. Don't trust people who tell u #science is a meritocracy!
The Janelia #Unity Toolkit now supports panoramas, back-projected onto a cylindrical screen, updated in real time for a tracked viewpoint within the cylinder. The intended application is #VR for #Neuroscience studies of animals like #Drosophila. The code is a byproduct of another project so it's a bit experimental, but it's fun to watch examples like this one, meant to be displayed with three adjoining projectors. (1/2)
#lablife
a rare begining of the week to have good news on technical success: #Drosophila#Electroretinogram is starting to produce good data; DART system from @BFKlab is running too, so we can finally probe arousal threshold again!