Projects

All organisms can adjust their form and physiology to suit changes in their environment. Economically devastating locust swarms result from an extreme type of such “phenotypic plasticity”. Depending on population density, the locust genome can manifest as one of two very different phenotypic outcomes: a lone-living “solitarious phase” or a swarming “gregarious phase”. Gregarious behaviour can arise within hours of crowding, and is soon ...

Regulatory RNAs play important roles in the control of gene expression. A major scientific milestone in the study of regulatory small (s)RNAs was the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), which resulted in the Nobel Prize for Fire and Mello (2006). This process is triggered by double stranded RNA and results in sequence-specific post-transcriptional gene silencing. In insects, the most speciose class of animals, RNAi constitutes the main ...

The recent soar in single cell and single cell-type analyses relies on breakthrough technologies to unveil tissue heterogeneity. Until recently, researchers in biological and life sciences would work at the resolution of entire organs or tissues, for example by trying to establish how the brain displays plasticity and how that affects the entire organism. It is however no secret that organs and tissues consist of different cell types, which ...

The adult mammalian brain possesses two neurogenic niches of which the neurogenic potential declines steeply with age. Yet teleost fish, possess sixteen neurogenic niches and exhibit a very high potential for adult neurogenesis. Most remarkably, they can regenerate tissue, including brain, upon injury. The African turquoise killifish recently gained much attention as potent ageing model based on its short life cycle, explosive growth and the ...

Males in many frog families yearly develop keratinized, often spiny nuptial pads on their thumbs and

forearms during the reproductive period, and it is generally accepted that these serve to improve

grip on the female during amplexus. Here we hypothesize that nuptial pads also secrete primer

pheromones that bypass the conventional olfactory system and are injected to directly trigger

physiological changes in the ...

The loss of senses such as seeing and hearing is one of the major sources of disability and is associated with high economic costs. With an aging population, there is an acute need for low-cost and effective therapies to help patients cope with and to compensate for sensory losses, as well as for new devices that can restore function. Key to these developments is an understanding of the physiological changes that occur in the brain upon loss ...