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/
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!
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
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.
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!
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!
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!
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)
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.
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..!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Anya and Gareth contemplating their next scientific challenges following publication of their papers on consecutive days.
We are so proud!
Dr. Nicole Noel has been awarded the prestigious CIHR Banting Postdoctoral fellowship to continue her project on modelling age-related macular degeneration in the emerging rapidly ageing model the killifish. Nicole joined the lab in 2022 on a BrightFocus postdoctoral fellowship and has made several exciting discoveries around the molecular mechanisms underpinning age-related degenerations, including those that are similar to what happens in human disease. Some of these findings were published earlier in 2024 with Nicole as co-first author (https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.14192). We can't wait to see what Nicole finds in the news few years!
https://banting.fellowships-bourses.gc.ca/en/2023-2024-eng.html
Massive congratulations to Giulia and Anya who both won prizes at the UCL Neuroscience Symposium.
Giulia (Bianco lab) won a prize for her poster about neural control of hunting sequences and Anya (formerly Rihel lab) won the early career prize for her work on synaptic changes during sleep.
A fantastic achievement and we’re all incredibly proud of them.
We're excited that an image from our PhD student Natalia Jaroszynska was awarded the cover of the upcoming issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Natalia is first author on a paper characterising c9orf72 mutant zebrafish in a collaboration between the MacDonald and Keatinge labs (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/44/25/e2128232024.long). This paper identifies potential retinal degeneration phenotypes in the eye that may be relevant for patients with motor neuron disease.
Also cited here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioo/news/2024/jun/confocal-image-one-our-labs-cover-journal-neuroscience
Rorscharch Test by Ana Faro
The new Wilson Lab paper in Science provides new insights into the development of brain asymmetry and the Wnt signalling pathway.
You can read the paper (don’t forget to check out the supplementary material too!) or for an easy intro to this exciting story read the lay summary on the UCL website.
Thanks and congratulations to all authors on this very collaborative study!
Links:
Press release: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/biosciences/news/2024/may/left-side-story-new-insights-genetics-brain-asymmetry
Open Access paper at UCL Discovery: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10191627/
Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade6970