We love pure luck.

Zebrafish finds Nemo. New paper with our great collaborators on gap junctional communication in widely divergent species.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And for anyone who thinks these strategies might hold promise for their own career goals, we're still hiring at the postdoc level.

Together the papers show how much can be learned when we try to understand adult traits and their variation with an explicitly approach, including comparative analyses, transcriptomics, chemistry, classical methods of development and developmental genetics, and behavior.

And in PNAS, we show the different ways that white cells develop, within and between species.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Graded BMP signals modulate yellow and red color in fishes, impacting adult pigment patterns and conspecific shoaling behavior Among the most interesting adult traits are those with roles in animal communication. Yet, developmental mechanisms by which genes drive cell behavior…

In Current Biology we show how BMP signals promote fin pattern formation, the development of xanthophores vs erythrophores, and consequences for fish behavior. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Pleased to announce two new publications, in Current Biology and PNAS, from outstanding postdoc Delai (Dylan) Huang, just a week before he leaves to start his new faculty position at Zhejiang University.

Or the HR version with less Cormac McCarthy.

We have a postdoc position available. Please forward to anyone who may be interested.

Image of an adult male zebrafish (Danio rerio) with distinctive yellow and blue stripes. You can see their reflection in the bottom of the clear tank. Credit to Dr. Paco López-Cuevas.

Did you know @zebrafishhusbandry.bsky.social has a guide to zebrafish husbandry basics in 22 languages including Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Serbian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu & Japanese 1/2 🧪

UVA researchers look to songbirds to teach us about the human brain YouTube video by University of Virginia

Nice video for lay audience on use of songbirds for neurodegeneration/regeneration research, with UVA faculty member Dr. Tracy Larson (lab next door to mine and coPI of ongoing experiment to raise human F1s at home).

youtu.be/FUzuWyguADY?...

I called NC Senators Tillis and Budd--call your Senators!

Worth a read--the DEI scrubbing, while disappointing, is perhaps not surprising , but substantially inflating his publication record.....

Interestingly he did have some danio papers much later. Goodrich and Greene 1959 has been especially important to our own work on D. albolineatus.

Birds = dinosaurs = fish.
We seem to have an on-going selection experiment in this area. Should know more in a few years.

New model system. ASIP (a-y/a-t); MC1R (E-m/+); MFSD12 (i/+); TYRP1 (b-s/+); MITF (s-p/+); RALY (+/+). IYKYK.
Also a very good boy.

We think this is going to be a very useful system for studying the evolutionary origins of new cell types, important for understanding organismal complexity, diversification and behaviors. Thanks to our great collaborators and to NIGMS for supporting the work.

So what's all this mean? The upshot is that we find a lot of ways to make white cells, this being a very different mechanism from that of another population even in zebrafish
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Metabolomic analyses (eew, chemistry) confirmed differential accumulation of pale/white/colorless over yellow pigment in the transition of xanthophore-like (~X) cells to "xantholeucophores" (~XL).

This suggested that sepiapterin reductase might be changing yellow pteridine to pale or colorless pteridines and that other pteridine genes might be upregulated in these cells. Pathway enrichment analyses showed that was true, with these hits in the pteridine pathway (among others not shown):

Same target in white cloud minnow also gets rid of the white material.

And indeed when we knocked it out, we turned the white cells back to yellow.

We asked about other genes by RNA-seq and found a good candidate in sepiapterin reductase (spra/b), in the pteridine pigment pathway.

And their differentiation from these xanthophore-like cells requires gap junctional communication as well as the aquaglyceroporin and peroxiporin channel Aquaporin 3a, which we show is mutated in duchamp.

Here we focused on white cells, leucophores, that are present in zebrafish, with spots of carotenoids, and also leucophores in white cloud minnow. In zfish we used fate mapping to show the cells arise from xanthophore-like progenitors in the fin.

Just in time for the New Year we have a new preprint up that focuses on white cells, often used as ornaments in fish.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

So signaling at the molecular level allows for signaling at the organismal level, with lots of room for fine-tuning. Fun project with insights we wouldn't have gotten without the multi-level approach. Thanks as always to great collaborators and to NIGMS. Now we just need to start breeding peacocks.

Our take-home model is that graded variation in BMP signaling activity, combined with thresholds for cell-fate specification, sets up pattern in the fin (interpreted differently across species).

And even "closer to home" we found that BMP signaling was essential for patterning zebrafish fins.

What's more is that the pathway is conserved across species. When we looked at white cloud minnow, here too we had differential BMP activity between cell types and BMP-dependence of fate specification and pattern.