Congratulations to Will, Clare, Vassilis and the team on their paper on sleep in Nature!

Why do we get sleepy? Congratulations to Will, Clare, Vassilis and co-authors, who have just published an exciting paper in Nature identifying neuronal populations that monitor prolonged wakefulness and actively promote sleep.

To identify the brain regions involved, the researchers compared brain activation patterns in mice during normal sleep–wake cycles, sleep deprivation, and recovery sleep. These data can be explored in the interactive Sleep-Wake Atlas: Sleep-Wake Atlas

Further experiments showed that long-term inhibition of two neuronal populations substantially reduced sleep need, with mice sleeping approximately 70% less than usual. Remarkably, many of the animals did not show some of the behavioral impairments typically associated with prolonged sleep deprivation.

Together, these findings suggest that these neurons not only influence how much animals sleep, but also help determine how strongly the need for sleep builds up during prolonged wakefulness. Congratulations to the whole team on this fascinating work!

Read the paper here: link.

Congratulations to Oded on his preprint!

How does the brain decide whether an odor is attractive or aversive? In larval zebrafish, Oded Mayseless and co-authors reveal that odor preference is represented by spatially cohesive neuronal domains within the olfactory bulb, in collaboration with the lab of Rainer Friedrich.

Using weMERFISH, Flashseq, CampariSeq, and a custom-built behavioral setup, Oded and authors show that the larval zebrafish olfactory bulb is organized spatially, transcriptionally, and functionally in ways that reflect whether odors are perceived as attractive or aversive. Their work provides new insight into how sensory information is transformed into meaningful behavioral responses.

Read more here!

Will's paper on Restless Legs Syndrome published in Current Biology

Congratulations to Will Joo and co-authors for publishing their work on Restless Legs Syndrome in Current Biology! In this study, Will used zebrafish to investigate the function of MEIS1, one of the strongest genetic risk factors associated with the disorder. He found that loss of MEIS1 leads to abnormal locomotor behavior and developmental defects in cerebellar Purkinje cells, revealing a mechanistic link between an RLS-associated gene, cerebellar development, and motor control. These findings provide new insights into the neural basis of Restless Legs Syndrome and highlight a potential role for the cerebellum in its pathogenesis. Link to the paper.

Contratulations to Annika who is starting her own lab at UNIL-CIG!

Annika Nichols is starting her own lab at UNIL-CIG. After working on the daily-activity patterns across 60 Tanganika chiclid species, she is returning to her beloved worms to explore the neuronal basis of nematode behavioural diversity. She has also been awarded an Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Starting Grant to launch her research. Her lab will investigate the circuit- and system-level functional and genetic mechanisms underlying differences in heat sensation between the temperate species Caenorhabditis elegans and the tropical species Caenorhabditis tropicalis. You can learn more about her lab and future research here.

She will be greatly missed in the lab, and we wish her all the very best for this exciting new chapter!

Congratulations to Yinan and the team for their paper on embryogenesis in 4D!

Yinan and her team have generated a huge dataset capturing how gene expression changes across time and space in zebrafish embryos. To do this in the thick zebrafish embryo samples they developed a new method: whole-embryo imaging platform using multiplexed error-robust fluorescent in situ hybridization (weMERFISH). Moreover, they could map the expression of thousands of unmeasured genes through computational methods. Allowing the most expansive and comprehensive transcriptional atlas of embryo development yet. This exciting work was published in Science. Read more about the work here and the paper itself here. This is a huge collaborative project with valuable contributions from many scientists. Learn more about the collaborative labs: Bogdan Bintu, Guoqiang Yu, Susan Mango, and Ahilya Sawh.

See also a companion paper on mapping lineages by the lab of Guiqiang Yu with contributions from Joaquin, Yinan and Alex.

Congratulations to Emily who is starting her lab at NYU!

Emily is going back to her beloved New York to start her very own lab researching how internal sensation affects behaviours in two species: Danionella and C. elegans. The Danionella fish species are some of the smallest vertebrates, and are transparent! Allowing for unparalleled visualisation of neurons within a vertebrate adult (much like our lab’s favourite model organism zebrafish larvae). C. elegans also offers this visual tractability (as well as genetic and experimental tractability). We’re so excited for Emily that she will have her own lab to explore the interesting world of internal sensation! Learn more about her new lab here

Congratulations to Madalena who has started her own lab at the MPI-CBG!

While we’re sad to see Madalena leave the Schier lab, we’re so excited for her to start her own group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics! Madalena and her lab will dissect how translation is controlled during zebrafish embryogenesis. We look forward to hearing about her lab’s exciting new findings and wish her the very best! Learn more about her new position here

Congratulations to Emily as her paper on internal mechanosensation is published!

Congratulations to Emily on her newly published paper The DEG/ENaC channel DEGT-1 is a proprioceptor of C. elegans foregut movement. We not only receive sensation from the outside world such as sight and hearing, but also from our internal worlds such as hunger and balance. One form of internal perception is proprioception where we receive feedback of our body’s position and how it movement. Here she has uncovered the role of a channel for internal sensation of pharynx movement. You can read the paper here.

Congratulations Annika and Max on their cichlid paper coming out in Nature Eco. Evo.!

Congratulations to Max and Annika and all their coauthors on their new paper! Cichlid fishes are exceptionally fast at speciation. Lake Tanganyika is only about 10 million years old and has about 250 endemically evolved cichlid species. Our lab collaborated with Lake Tanganika cichlid species experts the Salzburger lab, and found that cichlids have diverse activity patterns. Some are night active (nocturnal), some day active (diurnal) and others are most active during the dawn and dusk, while others have no clear rhythm. This temporal niche partitioning could have supported the rapid diversification of these species.

Read also the news and views here.

Max now has his own lab at the University of Toronto.

The beautiful fish drawings come from talented artist Julie Johnson.

New review on Nodal signalling in embryonic development!

Nodal signalling molecules are crucial for key steps in embryonic development. The function of these TGFβ family ligands are largely conserved across vertebrates. Yet there remain many unanswered questions on how these molecules and the genes they regulate control embryonic tissue patterning. Read more about it in this extensive review by Alex and two talented PhD students from the lab: Jake and Mireia!