Albert Cardona @albertcardona@qoto.org

@bruvellu Welcome! By the way brilliant work on that miniature annelid [1].

"Conservative route to genome compaction in a miniature annelid", Martín-Durán et al. 2021 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-01327-6

#DevBio #biology #genomics

@herrsaalfeld @KazOhashi_Lab Great point: given this distribution of aphid observations in the whole European continent (including the UK; left), and in the UK alone (right), there are likely far more aphids in the rest of Europe ... there's also far more land area, and I can't be bothered to normalize it, so I'll vaguely gesture at marginally relevant data.

Plots from here, filtering for "Europa" and "United Kingdom" (notice the location filter near the top right under the search box):
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/52381-Aphididae

@Lesley4Nature @entospace No Y chromosome for bees, which is why the worker cast can, in some species (e.g., bumblebees), lay unfertilized eggs that grow into males.

There's a very interesting evolutionary dynamic there, with the daughters competing with the queen, and the queen actively seeking and destroying the eggs of workers. When the queen dies earlier than expected, a colony saves itself–so to speak–, genetically, by rearing males.

The 2010 book by Dave Goulson "Bumblebees Behaviour, Ecology, and Conservation" goes into quite some detail about this. It's fascinating.
#bumblebees #bees #entomology

@lili Sounds exciting! Back in my postdoc times, the lab organized a "Development and disease" journal club and only a fraction survived close scrutiny by a dozen students and postdocs. There was often either a fundamental flaw, or some shady corners. Given that papers were chosen from flashy journals, that opened my eyes to what the pressure to publish can do to the scientific enterprise. Looking forward to seeing what you'll come up with; almost rooting for a selection of the good ones only.

@herrsaalfeld @KazOhashi_Lab It's both ways: the offspring returns and lays eggs in Britain, to start the cycle again. A great argument in support of (the obvious fact that) Britain being an integral part of the European subcontinent, rather than a separate piece of land.

@dantracey You’re doing great—just keep being yourself. No hurry to reestablish the same level of engagement. I’d take it easy like a holiday.

The impact of exercise on the brain was brought into focus, for me, by Stryker's lab work on approaches to recover from long-term vision deprivation through visual training while exercising physically ("stimulated by locomotion").

The underlying mechanism seems to be "the reduction produced by deprivation in thalamocortical excitation is compensated for during recovery by a corresponding reduction in the magnitude of inhibition."

Stryker wrote a review here:

"A neural circuit that controls cortical state, plasticity, and the gain of sensory responses in mouse" Stryker 2014 http://symposium.cshlp.org/content/79/1.short

Related, given that awake animals are often on the move:

"We have now studied the response properties of neurons in primary visual cortex of awake mice that were allowed to run on a freely rotating spherical treadmill with their heads fixed. Most neurons showed more than a doubling of visually evoked firing rate as the animal transitioned from standing still to running, without changes in spontaneous firing or stimulus selectivity."

"Modulation of visual responses by behavioral state in mouse visual cortex", Niell and Stryker 2010 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627310000590

#neuroscience #exercise #plasticity

On the instability (plasticity?) of cortical areas, just got reminded of this classic work:

"Somatosensory cortical map changes following digit amputation in adult monkeys", Merzenich et al. 1984 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cne.902240408

#fMRI #neuroscience #cerebralcortex