Beating Monday Morning Blues with Weekend Camping! Interview with Ellen Stothard on regulation of body clock by natural light.

Surely you have bing-watched your favorite series on Netflix, tucked inside a blanket with a hot cup of chocolate during a lazy weekend. We keep our eyes glued to the computer screen deep into the night, and shift bed time. But then comes Monday, and the body wants to remain inside the same warm blanket. Our body clock shifts and it wants to sleep late, and wake up later. Is there any way to reset the body to normal time? Get it refreshed for the week?

Ellen, Andrew and colleagues from University of Colorado find that exposing the body to natural light is an easy fix for the disrupted body rhythm. They find that spending a weekend under artificial light shifts the body clock to a later period, but that such delay can be prevented by weekend camping under natural sunlight. So to all people who feel the blues on Monday, pitch a tent. To know in detail on this phenomena, please listen to Ellen.


For further information, please refer to:
Circadian Entrainment to the Natural Light-Dark Cycle across Seasons and the Weekend
Stothard, McHill et al., Current Biology, 2017

Mind reading! Interview on Brain-computer interface for the completely locked-in by Ujwal Chaudhary.

Stephen Hawkins uses a special computer technology which translates the movements of his cheek muscles to communicate with the outside world. His inability to move any other muscle is due to loss of muscular function from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) disease. Unfortunately, some patients with ALS do not even retain a single musclular function, while retaining all mental functions; a state called locked-in syndrome. It would be great to help such people with a technology that could directly read the thoughts of the unfortunate patient.

With this inspiration, Ujwal and colleagues developed a brain-computer interface capable of reading simple 'yes' or 'no' thoughts of completely locked-in individuals. The interface is completely non-invasive and can be trained to read thoughts to any question. With this they can increase the interactions with the patients, stimulating and enriching their time, and increasing contact with the outside world.

This generates a nucleus that can be expanded to read full sentences, a technology out of sci-fi, but surely of great use to the unfortunately paralyzed. Please listen to Ujwal on this amazing technology.


To know further on the research, please read:
Brain–Computer Interface–Based Communication in the Completely Locked-In State.
Chaudhary et al., PLoS Biology, 2017

Sex is in the details! Interview with Esther Saiz on gender influencing neuronal circuitry.

'Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.' But what differs between Mars and Venus. According to the author of the book, John Gray, the difference lies in the psyche. These differences could stem from different wiring inside the brain of individual sexes. With 100 billion neurons in the brain of typical human, and maybe as many as 1,000 trillion total connections, its a daunting task to answer this question.

Enter Esther and colleagues with their powerful model system C. elegans, which is a small transparent worm whose each and every cell in the body is accurately mapped along with most of cell's interacting partners. When they looked carefully at one neuron that differed between the sexes in C. elegans, they found a machinery that influenced the sex-specific maturation and behavior of that cell. Strikingly, this influence was not due to sexual hormones, but was wired inside the identity of the cell. So, just changing this one cell changed certain behaviors of the animal from one sex to another! To know more, please listen to Esther.


For further information, please refer to:
Sexually Dimorphic Differentiation of a C. elegans Hub Neuron Is Cell Autonomously Controlled by a Conserved Transcription Factor.
Saiz et al., Current Biology, 2017.
BioRxiv Link.

It's an emergency! Interview with Gesa Zander on cellular response to heat stress!

Imagine a sudden crisis within a country. One day, suddenly, there is a need to face an impending disaster. What happens? The people go into panic-mode and stop doing their regular jobs, and instead focus on averting the crisis. Normal production ceases, and things needed to face the disaster are produced. The pace of production is ramped, and irrespective of the quality, a huge quantity of emergency supplies is generated.

Like humans, cells in our body also face crisis. They need to adapt to extreme environments quickly in order to survive and thrive. Gesa, Alexandra, Lysann and colleagues wanted to know what happens to the cellular production process during the stress period. How does the cell switch to producing cell-responsive genes. And not only producing, but producing at a fast-pace. Are the quality controls applicable during normal times also applicable during the frantic response to stress. They find that the cell switches to stress-control mode, and for a certain time, eases on the quality controls of production. Please listen to Gesa on the interesting adaptability of the cells.


For more information, please refer to:
mRNA quality control is bypassed for immediate export of stress-responsive transcripts
Zander et al., Nature, 2016

A Time to Spring! Interview with Julia Qüesta on cold sensation in plants!!

Winter ends and the layer of snow clears off the ground. The soil is fresh for new cycle of vegetation. It instantly converts to a beautiful expanse of flowers and fresh plants. How does such a drastic change occur? How did the plants 'know' the change in seasons. They don't have an almanac or the weather channel to tell them of the ending cold, or do they??

Julia and colleagues undertook to understand the sensing of winter-to-spring transformation in plants. It is possibly the most important decision for the survival of the plant. Arising anew from winter needs to be perfectly timed. A little early, and the frosty cold will chill the new life. A little late and the other plants would have taken away precious space and resources, making it difficult to fight for survival. And importantly, its a one time event: an on-off switch. The plant needs to integrate a million parameters into a single result. An elaborate chain of events culminating into a life or death choice.

How does the switch operate? Julia and colleagues map the system to basepair resolution by finding the machinery and its corresponding binding sites on the plant genome for controlling the process. This amazing feat (for plant and the team) is a perfect example of how simplicity underlies complex decision making. To understand more, please listen to Julia.



To know more, please refer to:
Arabidopsis transcriptional repressor VAL1 triggers Polycomb silencing at FLC during vernalization.
Qüesta et al., Science 2016.

Colonizing Mars! Lessons on avoiding inbreeding issues from flatworms by Longhua Guo!

Imagine the year 2500. We have chosen twenty of our best and brightest to send to Mars. They have the mission to start a human colony there. Of-course that would mean breeding and generating more humans. But with only 20 people, the population might be genetically too small. Creating babies from genetically similar individuals, like cousins, can lead to birth defects. Within a few populations, intermixing might doom the entire project, just like inbreeding doomed the once powerful Habsburg Dynasty. How can we avoid this?

The question is not only critical to our hypothetical journey to Mars, but also to survival of critically endangered species. Very few individuals of hawksbill turtle, tigers and many other remain. How can we avoid in-breeding defects in such animals in near future. The answer to that might lie in the champions of regeneration, freshwater planarians. Planarians are known for their amazing capacity to regenerate a full animal from any part of their body. But also, as Longhua and colleagues found out, can avoid their genome from becoming similar after multiple rounds of in-breeding. How can these animals achieve such feat, please listen to Longhua to know more:


For more information, please refer to:
Widespread maintenance of genome heterozygosity in Schmidtea mediterranea.
Guo L., et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2016.

Further information can be found here:
The joy of figuring things out: a story of worms, haplotypes & genetic ancestry.

No man left behind! Interview with Judith Yanowitz on faithful DNA segregation during meiosis.

DNA is the strand that connects generations of life. It contains the information needed for all phases of life, and that information needs to be faithfully passed on to the off-springs for the specie to continue. In multiple organisms, this information is divided into chromosomes, and each of these chromosomes need to be copied and separated equally during germ cell formation. Any disturbance in the logistics of chromosome separation can leave one of the two daughter cells with less or more material, which can be detrimental.

How does the cell ensure proper logistics during the process? How does it know when the separation process has started and when each and every chromosome has been successfully separated? It's not a simple counting process since the number of chromosome differs between species, with humans having 23 sets, but our close relatives, chimpanzees and ape have 24 pairs. How does the cell adapt to this diversity. Tyler, Rana, Judith and colleagues ask this question and find a very interesting mechanism guiding the process. They find a surveillance mechanism that starts as soon as the first chromosome starts information exchange, and lasts until the last one finishes, thereby ensuring that the process only proceed after its faithful completion. To understand the details, please listen to the interview with Judith.


To know more about the work, please read the following article:
A Surveillance System Ensures Crossover Formation in C. elegans
Tyler and Rana et al., Current Biology, 2016