Embryos, juveniles, adults, mating, senility, and stage-associated diseases (e.g., Alzheimer's): we are interested in the mechanisms of developmental processes through all lifecycle stages - from individual cells to whole organisms - and in biocomputation, as recent papers show:
Claudio Stern and others from CDB, in collaboration with colleagues from the USA, have published a paper dedicated to the memory of Professor Ruth Bellairs (1926–2021), who contributed so much to the study of somites and chick embryos, and who nurtured the authors’ love of embryos. Their observations in this paper challenge some assumptions underlying existing models of transient somite formation - somites being the structures that give rise to muscles and the skeletal system. [Image: Schematic representation of a mid-sagittal fracture with posterior-PSM represented as 0% of its length and anterior-PSM as 100%.]
The authors used Scanning Microscopy (SEM), immunocytochemistry (where proteins are detected using antibodies that target the ones of interest) and confocal microscopy to study the progression of cell shape change and polarization along the tail-to-head axis of the embryo. SEM revealed that pre-somitic mesoderm (PSM) epithelialization is a gradual process, which begins much earlier than previously thought, starting with the dorsal-most cells, then the medial ones, and then, simultaneously, the ventral and lateral cells, before a somite fully separates from the PSM. But the core (internal) cells of the PSM and somites never epithelialize. This paper, with first-named author being Agnieszka Piatkowska, also received the Journal of Anatomy’s Joint Runner-Up Best Paper Prize (2023).
Arantza Barrios is co-author of a paper published in Current Biology, in collaboration with her colleague, Doug Portman (Rochester University) and others.
They identify what information about a potential mate C. elegans males detect and take into consideration when choosing to mate. They also identify some of the neurones in the male, which detect such information. They found that males are quite picky, and can discriminate between potential mates on the basis of sex, age, health and mating history!
Gerold Baier’s group has had a paper published in Brain Bulletin, proposing a three-node motif reduced network in order to holistically understand the seizure propagation behaviour of focal epilepsy. Highlights of the work include that:- 3-node modal configurations bear rich information flow evolution of focal seizures;
- focal seizure spreading can be largely categorized as four specific patterns; and
- the criticality is helpful to propose novel seizure control strategies.
Gerold was also a co-author of another paper with collaborators from Beijing University of Technology on Exploring the dynamical transitions on an epileptic hippocampal network model and its modulation strategy based on transcranial magneto-acoustical stimulation.
The Rihel Lab, with François Kroll as first author, has published their work, which combines rapid loss-of-function mutagenesis of Alzheimer’s risk genes and behavioural pharmacology in zebrafish to predict disrupted processes and candidate therapeutics.
By exposing genes associated with disease, genomic studies provide hundreds of starting points that should lead to druggable processes. However, our ability to systematically translate these genomic findings into biological pathways remains limited. To allow researchers to generate pharmacological predictions from their own sleep/wake datasets, the authors built an online app (ZOLTAR) that can plot behavioural fingerprints.
Chris Barnes' group, with Alex Fedorec as first-named author, have just had a paper published in Nature Communications. In it, they demonstrate how one can engineer digital bio-computation using bacterial colonies and morphogen gradients. It's the last major project that Alex worked on while in Chris' group, and was a fantastic collaborative effort.
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