The Zimmer Lab

Catching up with Jösch Lab from @ISTAustria Great to see how much happened within a year in worm, fish, mouse & fly brain world!

Very proud of our Manuel 🤗

Two years and thousands of brain pics lie between these two group photos. We welcome many new colleagues, some of them you can find on Twitter: @Mrinnanda @ch9uk9 @Laxmi__Yadav @xmryyx

For last week's Journal Club our Master student Matthias was in perfect partnerlook with his heatmaps 🤓🔰

Smooth transition to 2024 with two new Masters of Science! @jfrank0990 and @FabioNaEcht defended their work masterfully. We are happy they will continue to work with us in their PhD – Fabio right here, Johannes collaborating from Norway!

Enjoying our joint Lab retreat with Jösch Lab from @ISTAustria! Worm, mice & fly brains unite!

We found that in natural aqueous environments, worms leave a strong CO2 trace. Transient inhibition prevents over-adaptation of the sensory neurons when reversing into their own path, thus in fact ensuring proper encoding of outside world stimuli during forward exploration! 7/

We could show that tyramine released from the reversal command neuron RIM acts on the inhibitory chloride channel lgc-55 directly expressed in BAG. But why does a worm need this so called “corollary discharge” signal? 6/

Probing first the sensory level we imaged BAG, a neuron essential for CO2 sensing, and in fact we found that it readily encodes its gaseous environment. However, only during forward movement! When the worm changed to reverse crawling, the neuron was entirely silenced... 4/

We set out to answer this question in C. elegans, where we can track the information flow in a compact neural network during free movement in a defined sensory landscape. 3/