#zebrafish

#zebrafish

Dance Your PhDSince she was young, Antonia Gronberg has always been passionate about science and dancing. When she heard about Science's "Dance Your Ph.D." competition, she knew she just had to join. For someone who loves science and dancing, it was a perfect competition.Groneberg's performance, which is based on her doctoral thesis, tells how the motions of groups of zebrafish larvae affected the brain development and behavior of each one of them. The performance video was created with the help of Groneberg's colleagues, dance students, and children of the adult participants.Groneberg's zebrafish dance won the social science category of the competition as well as the overall prize.Here is Groneberg's dance.(Image Credit: DieTonella/ YouTube)#Science #InterpretativeDance #Zebrafish #Neuroscience

Scientists See How a Memory Forms in a BrainResearchers have long know that emotionally-charged memories, particularly those that involve fear, tend to stay around longer than other recollections. A team from the University of Southern California has actually watched imaging under a microscope as a fear experience was encoded in the brain of a living fish. Zebra fish are common in such studies, because they are transparent and they can easily be genetically engineered. The scientists engineered zebra fish to have a fluorescent protein marker in their brain synapses. Then they trained them to fear light. When a fish was exposed to a light, inducing a fear response, they expected the synapses of the palladium(a brain area analogous to the amygdala in mammals) to grow. Instead, they witnessed some synapse "pruning" in the palladium, and synapse building in other parts of the palladium. In other words, they rearranged their synapses. Read a deeper dive into this research and its implications at Quanta magazine. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Andrey Andreev, Thai Truong, Scott Fraser; Translational Imaging Center, USC)#brain #imaging #memory #synapse #zebrafish

Image Competition Winners Show the Diversity of Ecological ScienceThe image above by Kristen Brown shows a school of jackfish swimming in a spiral at the Great Barrier Reef. It was the overall winner in the 2021 photo competition from the scientific journal BMC Ecology and Evolution. The picture also won in the category Conservation Biology. The competition attracted entries from researchers all around the world eager to use their creativity to highlight their work and capture the diversity of the planet's flora and fauna. BMC Ecology and Evolution invited anyone affiliated with a research institution to submit to one of the following six categories: ‘Conservation Biology', 'Evolutionary Developmental Biology and Biodiversity', 'Behavioural Ecology', 'Human Evolution and Ecology', ‘Population Ecology' and 'Ecological Developmental Biology'.Our Senior Editorial Board Members lent their expertise to judge the entrants to the competition, selecting the overall winner, runner up and best image from each category. The board members considered the scientific story behind the photos submitted in addition to their artistic judgement (Fig. 1).#jackfish #fish #biology #photography #photocompetition