Conferences 2025 (first semester)

It has been a busy year attending and presenting at the Biologists @100 conference in Liverpool, the UCL - Institute of Ophthalmology Early Career Research symposia and the Genomics England Research Summit.

Aitor, Simona and Mara presented their projects at the Early Career Researcher conference (June 2025) at the Institute of Ophthalmology. Aitor, who is studying the mechanisms that control Eye Growth Compensation got the prize for best poster presentation!

Lucas Spink presented his project at the Genomics England Research Summit (June2025)

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Aitor ECR Prize

Mara ECR

Simona ECR

Lucas Genomics England Research Summit

Thanks to The Genetics Society and The Company of Biologists/BSDB for their support with conference grants

Poster Prize for Aitor

Aitor Bañon-Gonzalez who is studying the mechanisms that control Eye Growth Compensation got the prize for best poster presentation at the Early Career Researcher conference at the Institute of Ophthalmology. Congratulations Aitor!

LEAF GOLD Awarded to Fish Floor

The Fish Floor laboratories at UCL have once again been awarded GOLD by LEAF ,the Laboratory Efficiency Framework, for our efforts to increase sustainability across all areas of our research. ZebrafishUCL is totally committed to Reducing Plastic, Reducing Energy and creating a Culture of Change. You can read our many tips on good practices to adopt on a personal and laboratory/facility level at ZebrafishGreenLab.

Maintaining our GOLD status is hugely important to us but is also a team effort so congratulations and heartfelt thanks to our ZebrafishGreenLab Team who keep pushing us towards our goals. With special thanks to Gaia Gestri & Gareth Powell.

New paper on frizzled 5's importance for eye morphogenesis out now in Disease Models & Mechanisms

frizzled 5 mutant zebrafish are genetically sensitised to developing microphthalmia and coloboma 

Frizzled class receptor 5 (FZD5) is a Wnt receptor expressed in the developing eye, and individuals with variants in FZD5 exhibit microphthalmia/coloboma, supporting a role for this receptor in human eye formation. Eye development can occur normally in the absence of Fzd5 in zebrafish, but mutants are sensitised to developing eye malformations. By exploiting the sensitised nature of the fzd5 mutants, we further identified angio-associated migratory cell protein (aamp) as a novel gene involved in eye morphogenesis. Overall, our study confirms the importance of considering multiple genetic contributions when searching for the molecular aetiology of ocular malformations in humans.

Read this collaborative work and admire the eye catching cover image

https://journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/18/6/dmm052284/368227/frizzled-5-mutant-zebrafish-are-genetically

Cover: Confocal image showing the eye of a maternal-zygotic frizzled 5 mutant zebrafish 5 days post fertilisation stained to reveal tissue architecture with phalloidin-FITC (actomyosin cortical cytoskeleton, grey) and Sytox-Orange (nuclei, blue). Phalloidin staining allows visualisation of the outlines of the neurons in the retina and the plexiform layers.

Cajal exhibition

We had a lovely evening viewing an exhibition of Cajal’s fantastic neuroanatomical drawings at Imperial

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/events/190823/cajal-exhibition/

Is your 2-photon microscope any good?

How can you tell if a 2-photon microscope is performing at its best? Do the optics need aligning or should you install a new PMT? Our new paper in Nature Protocols provides several step-by-step procedures (no special equipment necessary) to test different aspects of microscope performance that can help troubleshoot issues and ensure consistent results over time (and across different labs).

Check out the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41596-024-01120-w

Working on this paper was a really fun group-effort. Congratulations to all the co-authors!

Unexpected diversity in the motor control of rapid eye movements

Charlie’s fantastic paper on the circuits that control hunting and exploratory saccades is now published in Current Biology: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.010

In our previous paper (10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.008) we discovered that zebrafish use a special type of saccadic eye movement when they hunt, which led us to hypothesise that there might be a distinct neuronal circuit responsible for its control. In this paper, we find that specialised subsets of motoneurons in the oculomotor nucleus are active during different saccade types, and then trace the premotor pathways that are responsible for their behavioural context-specific recruitment. Remarkably, the Type Y motoneurons that are exclusively involved in hunting get direct monosynaptic input from the hunting command neurons in the pretectum that we discovered a few years ago (10.7554/eLife.48114)!

Also check out this nice dispatch about the work from Celine Bellegarda and David Schoppik: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.11.045

UCL Expand Project

Golsana Haghdousti from the Tuschl Lab has been working with the Access and Widening team at UCL and has designed a 6-week course for Y12 students as part of UCL expand project. This page explains her topic: Fin-tastic Creatures - Exploring the Uses of Zebrafish in Human Research.

Zebrafish Academy 2024

We had 10 fantastic students visit the Fish Floor for a week to learn about our research and the life of a scientist first hand. In addition to gaining insight into the theory behind our research and experimental methodologies, the students got to perform their own experiments. Over the course of the week they learned classic molecular biology methods, immunohistochemistry, RNA in situ hybridisation and confocal microscopy. They also had the chance to see our cutting-edge behaviour assays used in our research into sleep and visual hunting behaviours and talk to the experts about their application.

Despite the novelty and complexity of the theoretical concepts we covered, the students’ presentations at the end of their placement demonstrated their ability to not only understand these concepts but also to place their own findings into the greater context of our research questions. We always love hearing these presentations and find them very inspiring.

A key part of the Zebrafish Academy is our mentorship programme. Each student is paired with a researcher. This gives them the chance to engage one-to-one with a scientist, to discuss their career aspirations and get targetted advice on their future academic path.

We received excellent feedback from this years cohort. We wish them every success in their future studies.

A big thank you to all of the Fish Floor Researchers whose time and expertise make this placement possible. We love inspiring the scientists of the future and sharing our love of all things zebrafish!

New Masters Students in the MacDonald Lab

The lab welcomes three new UCL Masters Students for 2024/2025.

Nikol will work with Gina to explore new genes regulating Muller glial tiling and neuronal contacts in the zebrafish retina.

Anson will work with Ola to study retina development and Muller glia regenerative potential in the killifish. 

Isabella will work with Nicole to study sex-specific differences in retina degeneration phenotypes in killifish. 

Look forward to see what they discover!

Former MacDonald lab members move onwards and upwards!

The most impactful thing we can do is train and support people to progress their careers, and ultimate reach their career goals. Three former members of the lab have gone on to further their academic careers.

Dr. Manuela Lahne was a postdoc in the lab from 2022-2023. She will start this fall as a tenure-track Lecturer at Queen Mary University in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences.

Dr. Natalia Jaroszynska was the first PhD student in the MacDonald lab at UCL. She has completed her degree and now moved on as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Caroline Hill at the Crick Institute. 

Ms. Aanandita Kothurkar joined as a Research technician after her MSc at UCL in 2022-2024. She has now started her PhD as part of the prestigious BBSRC WhiteRose PhD Programme at the University of Sheffield in the laboratory of Dr. Andrew Lin. 

We're proud to have played a small part in their careers and can't wait to see all that they accomplish!

Tuschl Lab seeking a Research Assistant

The Tuschl Lab at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH), University College London are looking for an experienced Research Assistant to focus on a grant to determine whether mRNA therapy can rescue a rare disorder of childhood characterised by manganese overload in the brain causing a disabling movement disorder. This proof-of-concept study will utilise cell and mouse models that mirror the human phenotype. For more information on the role please contact Dr Karin Tuschl (k.tuschl@ucl.ac.uk; http://zebrafishucl.org/tuschl)

Circuit control of saccadic eye movements

Check out our preprint in which we describe the neural circuits that control two types of saccadic eye movement. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.08.12.607184

When they’re hunting, zebrafish generate a specialised type of saccadic eye movement which differs from those used during routine visual exploration. We discover that these saccades are controlled by topographically organised subsets of motoneurons that are in turn controlled by two parallel premotor pathways — one is a generalist pathway used for all types of saccade and second is an action-specific pathway dedicated to hunting.

Congratulations to first author Charlie Dowell on a fantastic paper.

Mini-golf and cake

To mark Monique’s last day in the lab, Lewis baked what is perhaps the most impressive cake ever seen on the FishFloor

And we played mini-golf..!

Steve Wilson awarded the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Award 2024

The Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Award is given for outstanding achievements in genetics research using zebrafish as a model system. It is fantastic to have Steve’s career-long contributions to the Zebrafish community and his research achievements recognised. Steve presented the award lecture at the International Zebrafish Society conference in Kyoto. You can read more about the award here.

Photos courtesy of Emre Yaksi and the European Zebrafish Society

Mirror-assisted light-sheet microscopy

The Bianco lab’s paper introducing mirror-assisted light-sheet microscopy (mLSM) is now published in Neurophotonics.

This is a simple and elegant solution that uses a tiny mirrored prism to illuminate the ~25% of the zebrafish brain that is normally inaccessible to a laterally directed light sheet.

Congratulations to Asaph on a great paper.

Government minister visits UCL to explore life sciences research

and stops to feed the fish!

Baroness Gillian Merron, the Health Minister responsible for life sciences and innovation, toured some of UCL’s life sciences facilities including the UCL Zebrafish Facility and the Fish Floor Labs to see first-hand how our research is helping to tackle some of the world’s biggest health challenges.

Read more about the visit here.

Welcome to summer students Kristen, Matias and Joshua!

It's that time of year again and we are lucky to welcome three students to the laboratory for the summer. We have Kristen, 2nd year UCL undergrad, that will be joining Xhuljana to work on glial development projects. Joshua, Cambridge undergrad, who received a bursary from Churchill College Camrbidge to work with Nicole on a Killifish retinal ageing project.  Matias, PhD student with Leo Valdivia in Chile, who will join us on a EMBO short-term fellowship to look at new genes involved in Muller glia development.  

Zebrafish and MacDonald lab highlighted in the 2024 Moorfields Eye Chairty Impact Report

Moorfields Eye Charity is the leading charity in the UK funding research into eye health and innovation and improvement in patient care to help patients at Moorfields and globally. The MacDonald lab in incredibly grateful for the support from the charity, which includes PhD studentships and Springboard awards, allowing them to expediate their exploration into glial mechanisms of health and disease. Importantly, the charity has also funded several equipment grants to build a dedicated aquatics suite in the Institute of Ophthalmology. Initially this was just zebrafish in 2019, however in 2024 the unit was expanded to house the emerging ageing model, Killifish. This gives the MacDonald lab, and several other research groups (Moosajee, Young, Futter), access to state of the art facilties to house their animals and conduct world leading eye research.   

https://moorfieldseyecharity.org.uk/downloads/Impact-report-2024-final-low-res.pdf

Sleep vs Asymmetry

Anya and Gareth contemplating their next scientific challenges following publication of their papers on consecutive days.

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We are so proud!