Congratulations Vassilis on his paper on missing arousal molecule orexin/hypocretin in Botiidae fish species

We’re excited to see Vassilis’s paper on chromobotia fish sleep is out! When he was young he had an aquarium of chromobotia fishes. They come from the inland waters in Indonesia on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Vassilis could show that these fish have a very consolidated sleep compared to zebrafish, they even lie down on their sides! Surprisingly, this fish species lacked a functional version of the orexin/hypocretin arousal neuropeptide. Lack of this gene causes narcolepsy in dogs and humans. However, it doesn’t cause narcolepsy in these fish.

Learn more in the article

Madalena preprint on 5'UTR regulatory logic is online!

Congratulations Mada and co-authors on their work The regulatory landscape of 5′ UTRs in translational control during zebrafish embryogenesis. Mada used a massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA) of 18,154 RNA sequences to uncover the translation initiation potential of endogenous 5’UTRs by polysome profiling. They look at the regulation across zebrafish embryogenesis (2, 4, 6 and 10 hours post fertilisation). From this data they identified different regulatory dynamics and 86 potential regulatory motifs. Some of motifs are known RNA protein binding motifs, but many are new. This is exciting as each motif is a new lead to find regulatory proteins and further our understanding of how RNA to protein translation is controlled.

Congratulations again to Mada and the team!

Congratulations to Max and co-authors on their new BioRxiv paper on the evolution of day-night activty!

The daily change between night and day is an important signal in our environment. Animal species have adapted their activity patterns to optimise for activity for certain times of day. For example, eagles are diurnal (day active) while owls are nocturnal (night active). Published work suggests that mammals were mostly nocturnal during when they first evolved, and only diversified into diurnal species after the mass extinction of dinosaurs. However, we don’t know how these evolutionary patterns could look like for bony fishes - which make up about half of all vertebrate species. In this paper, we used a meta-analysis of activity patterns combined with phylogenetic reconstruction to investigate the evolutionary transitions of diurnality and nocturnailty of extant lineages. We find that the last common ancestor of bony fishes and all vertebrates was likely nocturnal. And that bony fishes are especially good at switching between diurnality and nocturnality (twice as much as the other vertebrates - birds, reptiles, mammals and amphibians). This work suggests that nocturnal lineages are more likely to survive through mass extinction events.

Read more in the manuscript Frequent transitions from night-to-day activity after mass extinctions here

And check out this piece in Science News here

Congratulations and farewell to Max Shafer who leaves us to start his own lab in Toronto!

Max and his wife Ahilya have moved to the University of Toronto to start their own labs. Max will be at the Department of Cell and Systems Biology and will continue working on the genetic regulation and evolution of sleep in cichlids and other fishes, learn more about his lab and their future research here.

We wish them all the best for this exciting new step in their scientific and personal lives!

Vassilis starts new job at Novartis!

Vassilis has moved from the Schier Lab to start an exciting position supporting data analysis at Norvatis! Vassilis has been a core part of the Schier lab, bringing genuine curiosity as well as a calm depth and breadth of knowledge. He will be sorely missed by all of us. Vassilis had ambitious aims during his postdoc, working on different aspects of sleep in clown loaches and, with Will, Amelia and Clare, on sleep homeostasis in mice. Keep tuned in the next year to hear more about these projects!

The Inaugural Swiss Schier Lab Retreat

After being delayed from its original March 2020 date, the first Swiss Schier Lab Retreat took place in Anzère. With plenty of COVID testing, scientific discussion, games, snow sports and delicious homemade cooking this retreat was a great success!

Congratulations to Rita and Jakob on winning the 2022 Foosball Extravaganza! Check out the “fun” section under “people” for pictures.

Alex elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Congratulations Alex on this huge honour! Read the Biozentrum news article here

The AAAS website describes Fellows as “distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching, and technology, to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public.”

Other AAAS Fellows include Thomas Edison and astronaut Ellen Ochoa.

Learn more about AAAS Fellows here