Lewis has joined the Bianco lab as a Research Technician. Welcome!
Viewing entries tagged
Bianco
Summer in London now seems to be well and truely over, but the lab did manage to get together for a lovely BBQ on the last sunny (and very hot) Saturday of the season.
Photo taken by Joanna (on a real, film camera).
We’re really proud of Asaph Zylbertal who won the UCL Early Career Neuroscience Prize (Advanced category) for his beautiful study about how recurrent interactions in the optic tectum help explain the interactions between sensory input and the brain’s internal state.
Here’s Asaph giving his talk at the UCL Neuroscience Symposium and receiving the award from Prof Trevor Smart.
Check out the paper here: doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78381
The Bianco Lab had a lot to celebrate this week. Not only was Asaph’s paper accepted, but UCL was awarded a Leverhulme Grant to support a project in the lab linking dynamic brain activity to flexible behaviour.
A celebratory dinner was very much in order!
In a recent paper from the Bianco Lab, we used light-sheet calcium imaging and computational modelling to explore how activity in neural networks affects their internal state and contributes to variability in activity and behaviour.
One of our key findings is that recurrent network interactions can explain multiple aspects of tectal physiology including the structure of spontaneous activity, variability in visual encoding, and habituation of prey-catching behaviour.
Congratulations to first author Asaph Zylbertal, and check out the paper here: https://elifesciences.org/articles/78381
The Bianco lab welcomes their newest postdoc, Eleni Petridou!
Welcome to Matthias who joins the Bianco lab from the Wellcome Optical Biology PhD programme.
The Bianco lab is looking for postdocs to join a Wellcome funded project examining how circuits integrate sensory and internal state information to select behavioural programmes and how sequences of motor actions are flexibly selected and tuned to accomplish behavioural goals. The lab uses a variety of approaches including functional calcium imaging, naturalistic behavioural assays, multiphoton optogenetics, circuit tracing and computational modelling.
Please contact Isaac to find out more and apply before 6 June 2022: bit.ly/3M1rwsT
We all enjoyed another excellent UCL Neuroscience Symposium, which featured fantastic talks by our own Charlie and Asaph.
The Bianco lab is looking to recruit one/two postdoctoral research fellows.
Positions are Wellcome funded for 4 years. Experience with custom design of optical systems or electrophysiology would be especially great, but most important is enthusiasm to understand the circuit basis of behaviour.
NOTE: We have extended the deadline for applications so you can now apply up until 30 NOVEMBER. Contact Isaac if you’re interested to find out more.
We’re delighted to announce that the Wellcome Trust are generously funding the Bianco lab for the next five years.
We will be using fast calcium imaging, electrophysiology and holographic optogenetic stimulation to figure out how zebrafish command and pattern their hunting sequences.
We’ll be advertising postdoc positions soon, so please contact Isaac if you’re interested.
As anyone who does 2-photon imaging in behaving animals will know, motion artifacts are a pain the neck and can be difficult to correct. We were lucky enough to contribute to a fantastic project in Angus Silver’s lab, which led to technology enabling real-time motion correction in 3D. As Joanna showed, it works beautifully in larval zebrafish!
Congratulations to Joanna Lau who was just awarded her PhD. Thanks also to her examiners, Jon Clarke and Andrew Murray.
In collaboration with Claire Wyart’s lab and Herwig Baier’s lab we have generated nine transgenic lines expressing optogenetic actuators and calibrated their efficacy using behavioural assays and in vivo electrophysiology. This should be a great resource for the zebrafish neuroscience community. Congratulations to first authors Paride Antinucci and Adna Dumitresco!
Check out this paper describing the neuroanatomy of a cerebellum-like structure, the torus longitudinalis, in zebrafish.
The beautiful tectal pyramidal cells have spiny dendrites (c.f. Purkinje neurons).
Check out our paper in Nature Communications in collaboration with Filippo del Bene’s lab.
Zebrafish lack ipsilateral retinal projections yet they are likely to us binocular cue for judging distnace to their prey (Bianco et al 2011). Now we describe a population of ‘intertectal neurons’ that appear to transfer visual information across the midline and are required for zebrafish to strike at prey. Congratulations to everyone involved in the project and especially Christoph Gebhardt.
Our manuscript describing pretectal neurons that control hunting behaviour is now published in eLIFE! Congratulations to Paride! https://elifesciences.org/articles/48114
Hunting is an innate behaviour that relies on predators executing a precise set of actions to identify, approach, target, and strike prey. In vertebrates, the identity of the brain circuits that trigger hunting is still unclear. These networks are thought to link sensory perception (seeing prey) with a specialised action (starting an attack).
Larval zebrafish are a good model in which to study these circuits, because they have a tiny, transparent brain where neurons can be observed in real time. In addition, it is expected that the networks that control hunting in this species will be preserved across other vertebrates.
To discover these networks, Antinucci et al. genetically engineered zebrafish larvae so that their brain cells would ‘glow’ when they became active. This revealed which individual brain cells would turn on when zebrafish started to hunt. These neurons were in a part of the brain called the pretectum, which receives visual information about prey from the eye.
Next, Antinucci et al. harnessed a technique called optogenetics to artificially turn on these brain cells in the pretectum, which caused the fish to start hunting even when prey was absent. In fact, stimulating just one pretectal cell was enough to trigger the behaviour. Conversely, killing pretectal brain cells using precise laser surgery hindered hunting in zebrafish exposed to prey.
These experiments suggest that pretectal brain cells act like a command centre that controls hunting. They likely play a decision-making role, determining when animals do and do not respond to events in their surroundings. Similar neurons likely control other types of behaviour. Understanding how these circuits work at the cellular level in zebrafish may help scientist study them in other organisms, such as humans.
The Bianco and Dreosti labs are really excited to be part of the ZENITH (ZEbrafish Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Training Hub) programme.
ZENITH is now recruiting 15 graduate students to start their PhD’s in 2020. They will undertake interdisciplinary systems neuroscience projects investigating sensorimotor processing using larval zebrafish.
The Bianco and Dreosti labs at UCL will be recruiting three students.
Visit the official website to learn all about the scheme, the available projects and download the application pack. Applications close on Jan 5th 2020.
What brain circuits control predatory behaviour?
Our paper identifying a pretectal command system that induces hunting behaviour is now on @biorxivpreprint. Congratulations to @anti_paride and Mónica Folgueira.
