Constitutive heterochromatin is essential for transcriptional silencing and genome integrity. The establishment of constitutive heterochromatin in early embryos and its role in early fruitfly development are unknown. Lysine 9 trimethylation of histone H3 ( ...
Animals, including humans, exhibit a remarkable variety of complex behaviours.
How the nervous system controls all these behaviours ranging from simple, stereotyped movements to flexible, adaptive actions is a central questions of neuroscience. One of the ...
In vertebrate embryos, the elongating body axis is patterned via the sequential and rhyth-mic production of segments from a posterior unsegmented tissue called the presomitic mesoderm (PSM). This process is controlled by a population of cellular oscillator ...
Central nervous system organogenesis is a complex process that obeys precise architectural rules. The impact that nervous system architecture may have on its functionality remains, however, relatively unexplored. To clarify this problem, we analyze the dev ...
The spinal cord is an elongated nervous structure that together with the brain forms the central nervous system. It relays sensory and motor information between the brain and the body, thus controlling most somatic and autonomic body functions. In recent y ...
Understanding how biological matter takes its shape is instrumental to biology, bioengineering, medicine, and bioinspired engineering. Gaining information on the principles of morphogenesis could enable clinicians to correct developmental abnormalities, ev ...
Animal locomotion is the result of complex and multi-layered interactions between the nervous system, the musculo-skeletal system and the environment. Decoding the underlying mechanisms requires an integrative approach. Comparative experimental biology has ...
SiliFish is an open-source desktop application tomodel and study zebrafish swimming. Here, we explain how to define the general parameters of the model, define cell populations, place them within the spinal cord, and define their projections. We explain ho ...
Spinal cord injury (SCI) interrupts axonal connections between the brain and the spinal cord, and is characterized by a spectrum of sensorimotor and autonomic impairments. While spontaneous recovery is limited, recent studies have shown that functional imp ...
The pathogenic bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae) can invade the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and cause meningitis with devastating consequences. Whether and how sensory cells in the central nervous system (CNS) become activated during bacteri ...
The ratio of nuclear content to cytoplasmic volume (N/C ratio) is a key regulator driving the maternal-to -zy-gotic transition in most animal embryos. Altering this ratio often impacts zygotic genome activation and de-regulates the timing and outcome of em ...
Quadruped animal locomotion emerges from the interactions between the spinal central pattern generator (CPG), sensory feedback, and supraspinal drive signals from the brain. Computational models of CPGs have been widely used for investigating the spinal co ...
How embryos scale patterning according to size is still not fully understood. Through in silico screening and analysis of reaction-diffusion systems that could be responsible for scaling, we predicted the existence of genes whose expression is sensitive to ...
In humans, mice, and other mammals key internal organs such as the gut, the lungs, the pancreas, and the liver all derive from the same embryonic tissue: the endoderm. The development of all of these structures thus depends on a same set of early cells, an ...
Despite a long history of research in motor control, the exact mechanism of how the brain communicates with the the invertebrate ventral nerve cord (VNC) and the vertebrate spinal cord on a single neuron basis remains largely elusive.
Drosophila melanogast ...
The body axis of vertebrate embryos is periodically subdivided into 3D multicellular units called somites. While genetic oscillations and molecular prepatterns determine the initial length-scale of somites, mechanical processes have been implicated in sett ...
Somitogenesis is the rhythmic and sequential formation of somites, which are tissue blocks that give rise to segmented adult body structures including the vertebrae and associated muscle. Somite formation is controlled by the segmentation clock, a populati ...
One of the most important goals in neuroscience research has always been to understand how animals control their behavior. However, the long focus on the role of brain neurons in behavioral control might be missing the full story. In fact, brain-wide fluct ...
The vertebrate axis is segmented into repetitive structures, the vertebrae. In fish, these segmented structures are thought to form from the paraxial mesoderm and the adjacent notochord. Recent work revealed an autonomous patterning mechanism in the zebraf ...
Within the extracellular matrix, matricellular proteins are dynamically expressed nonstructural proteins that interact with cell surface receptors, growth factors, and proteases, as well as with structural matrix proteins. The cellular communication networ ...
