Gaspar Jekely @jekely@qoto.org
- Platynereis connectome
- https://catmaid.jekelylab.ex.ac.uk
Professor at Centre for Organismal Studies (COS), University of Heidelberg, Germany
and
Living Systems Institute (LSI), University of Exeter, UK.
#neuroscience of marine larvae, #connectomics, #cilia, ciliary swimming, cell and nervous system #evolution, #GPCR, #neuropeptides, #Platynereis, #Trichoplax, #Nematostella, #Schistosoma, #coral #neuroscience #rstat #evolution
Joined Nov 2022
Pinned post
Here is my #introduction. I am a biologist interested in #neuroscience and the #evolution of cells and nervous systems. My research group studies #ciliated marine larvae from a whole-organism perspective, combining behaviour, #connectomics, #imaging, #CRISPR, #modelling and other approaches. We love marine #larvae, their #neurons, #cilia, and #neuropeptides.
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
Congrats to the new EMBO members !!
https://www.embo.org/press-releases/embo-announces-election-of-new-members/
In collaboration with Alison Cole and Ulrich Technau we also mapped the peptidergic #connectome of #Nematostella, by linking peptide-expressing to receptor-expressing cells.
In #Cnidaria, tissues are extensively connected via #neuropeptide signalling.
#neuroscience
The 31 new deorphanized #neuropeptide #GPCRs from #Nematostella and the #phylogenetic trees also allowed us to predict the ligand for many receptors across #cnidarians. We hope that cnidarian researchers will functionally characterising these e.g. by #CRISPR, as the Houliston lab has done for the MIH receptor.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000614
#evolution #neuroscience
Previously, only one #GPCR with a ligand was known in #cnidaria, the receptor for the #Clytia Maturation-Inducing-Hormone. This receptor was found by Gonzalo Quiroga Artigas and Philipp Bauknecht in our lab, in a collaboration with Evelyn Houliston.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000614
#cnidaria #neuropeptide #evolution #neuroscience
By phylogenetic reconstruction, Daniel Thiel and Luis Yanez could show that #cnidarian #neuropeptide receptors diversified independent from #GPCRs in bilateria. This parallel #evolution and expansion confirms that cnidarians do not represent the ancestral state in neuronal signalling (as implied by terms like 'pre-bilaterian') any more than bilaterians.
#receptor #evolution #neuroscience #phylogeny
To get a comprehensive list of #neuropeptides, we combined #bioinformatic screening and mass spectrometry in collaboration with Amanda Kieswetter and Liesbet Temmerman at KU Leuven. We found 15 new proneuropeptides and confirmed the endogenous processing (cleavage, amidation etc) of many of them. #Nematostella has at least 33 neuropeptide precursors.
#cnidaria #neuroscience
In our new preprint we characterise neuropeptide signalling in the cnidarian #Nematostella.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.03.547448v1
Daniel Thiel and Luis Yanez-Guerra screened 64 neuropeptides against 161 G-protein coupled receptors (#GPCR) and found activating peptide ligands for 31 receptors.
#cnidaria #neuropeptide #evolution #neuroscience
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
The connectome of the adult female fly brain, Drosophila melanogaster:
“Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult brain” by Dorkenwald et al. 2023 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v1
A project that started with Davi Bock and Wei Lee developing the TEMCA for the mouse visual cortex in Clay Reid’s lab (Bock et al. 2011 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09802), then Bock moving to #HHMIJanelia and developing the instrument much further to deliver the #FAFB volume (Zheng et al. 2018 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867418307876 ), and then the Seung, Murthy and Jefferis labs automatically re-registering, segmenting and annotating the whole volume via #FlyWire and more.
Extraordinary!
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
A warm welcome to all the new people at Mastodon 
.
There are many ways to find people to follow on here, just two examples:
https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
https://followgraph.vercel.app
There are also lists and other resources. Once properly set up, you'll feel rigth at home here!
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
Interested in building genetic tools to study development and regeneration? We're looking for research engineer to spearhead the development of transgenic tools in the emerging crustacean model Parhyale
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
"Phylogenetic tracing of midbrain-specific regulatory sequences suggests single origin of eubilaterian brains", by Schuster and Hirth, 2023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade8259
A genetic signature of bilateral animals with brains, including "a genetic boundary separating the rostral from caudal nervous systems, demonstrated for the metameric brains of annelids, arthropods, and chordates and the asegmental cycloneuralian and urochordate brain"
In other words, the genetic toolkit of the ancestor of both protostomes (arthropods, nematodes, molluscs and annelids) and deuterostomes (echinoderms and vertebrates) – the eubilaterian.
Gaspar Jekely
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Could this be the paradigm shift all of #OpenScience has been waiting for?
Council of the EU adopts new principles:
"interoperable, not-for-profit infrastructures for publishing
based on open source software and open standards"
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8827-2023-INIT/en/pdf
and now ten major research organizations support the proposal:
https://www.coalition-s.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/JointResponse2CouncilScholCommConclusions.pdf
What they propose is nearly identical to our proposal:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634
Does this now get the ball rolling, or is it just words on paper?
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
Wow, now that's some fascienating #neuroscience: "the unique insect-specific oskar gene plays a role in long-term memory through expression in adult neural stem cells. We show that oskar is expressed and required in stem cells of the adult cricket brain for long-term memory. Further, we provide evidence that oskar’s role in long-term memory involves regulation by the transcription factor Creb"
Consider organising a Royal Society scientific meeting (fully funded) and guest-edit a RS journal #royalsociety #conference
https://royalsociety.org/blog/2022/07/organise-a-scientific-meeting-and-guest-edit-a-theme-issue/
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
Hi Mastodon folks. Twitter is getting quieter so I've clearly lost my previous @scotttishwaddell twitterverse. I'll start posting occasional lab news here too (instead) so please follow if that's of interest. We've lots in the pipeline and I'm missing learning about the other cool science out there that used to flash by my eyes on Twitter. Cheers, Scott. #Introduction #neuroscience #drosophila #dopamine
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
It's actually happening! As part of the EMBL's TREC expedition, the collection of samples along the first land-sea transects around Roscoff, France, have started.
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
GCaMP8 is out!
"Fast and sensitive GCaMP calcium indicators for imaging neural populations", by Y. Zhang, M. Rózsa, et al. 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05828-9
"‘jGCaMP8’ sensors, based on the calcium-binding protein calmodulin and a fragment of endothelial nitric oxide synthase, have ultra-fast kinetics (half-rise times of 2 ms) and the highest sensitivity for neural activity reported for a protein-based calcium sensor."
Tested in both larva and adult #Drosophila, and in mouse.
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
Today the peer-reviewed version of our preprint is out:
"The #connectome of an insect brain"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add9330
Congrats to co-first authors Michael Winding and Benjamin Pedigo, and to all our lab members and collaborators who made this work possible over the years. A journey that started over 10 years ago–and yet this is but a new beginning. So much more to come.
See my #tootprint on the preprint from back in the Autumn: https://mathstodon.xyz/@albertcardona/109422190525090990
The data is available both as supplements and directly via #CATMAID thanks to hosting by the #VirtualFlyBrain:
https://l1em.catmaid.virtualflybrain.org/?pid=1&zp=108250&yp=82961.59999999999&xp=54210.799999999996&tool=tracingtool&sid0=1&s0=2.4999999999999996&help=true&layout=h(XY,%20%7B%20type:%20%22neuron-search%22,%20id:%20%22neuron-search-1%22,%20options:%20%7B%22annotation-name%22:%20%22papers%22%7D%7D,%200.6)
(The "Winding, Pedigo et al. 2023" annotation listing all included neurons will appear very soon in an upcoming update.)
For #neuropeptide afficionados:
Interesting new paper from James Checco's lab on two #Aplysia #allatotropin / #orexin receptors, one activated by a D-peptide the other one by an L-peptide.
Conversion of an L-stereoisomer to a D-stereoisomer is a big mystery in peptide biology - but it matters for rec specificity and lifetime.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217604120
Gaspar Jekely
boosted
The new tool MorphoFeatures allows researchers to automatically assign cell types and tissues in electron microscopy images, a step which is critical for understanding complex organisms. https://elifesciences.org/articles/86172?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic_insights
- Platynereis connectome
- https://catmaid.jekelylab.ex.ac.uk
Professor at Centre for Organismal Studies (COS), University of Heidelberg, Germany
and
Living Systems Institute (LSI), University of Exeter, UK.
#neuroscience of marine larvae, #connectomics, #cilia, ciliary swimming, cell and nervous system #evolution, #GPCR, #neuropeptides, #Platynereis, #Trichoplax, #Nematostella, #Schistosoma, #coral #neuroscience #rstat #evolution
Joined Nov 2022
