We are most delighted that Dr Tessa Herzog has just passed her viva! 

For her PhD, which was done in collaboration with Leon Lagnado, Tessa looked at how cone-photoreceptors in the live zebrafish eye encode visual stimuli at the level of glutamate release. Poster teaser below – watch this space for papers! 

Thank you also to Rob Hindges and Sylvia Schroeder for serving as examiners!

Wang X^§, Roberts PA, Yoshimatsu T, Lagnado L*^§, Baden T*^§. Amacrine cells differentially balance zebrafish colour circuits in the central and peripheral retina. Cell Reports 42:112055. (bioRxiv version). direct link. pdf.

We are excited to see our new work on avian retina up on bioRxiv!

Seifert M, Roberts PA, Kafetzis G, Osorio D, Baden T. Birds multiplex spectral and temporal visual information via retinal On- and Off- channels. bioRxiv 2022. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.20.513047v1

We find that birds use a fundamentally different strategy compared to mammals to communicate from the eye to the brain

Rather than neatly segregating information into neat and functionally opposite streams (On and Off, fast and sloww, greyscale and colour), most bird RGCs bunch the whole lot into single axons to “multiplex” the information.

This is energy expensive when considering spikes (mammals are great at saving energy here), but it is bandwidth efficient when considering limits on the optic nerve

We furhte posit that the bird strategy is the “original” one, shared with fish, reptiles and amphibians. The mammal strategy is probably derived, enabled by a radical simplification and reorganisation of circuits following the loss of 2 of the 4 original cones during the age of the dinosaurs

We are most delighted that Marvin Seifert has just passed his PhD viva!

For his thesis, which was done in collaboration with Daniel Osorio, Marvin looked at what the chicken eye tells the chicken brain. Combining MEA recordings with patterend spectral stimulation he worked out lots of exciting and new things in the way that birds process spectral information. Poster teaser below, watch this space for paperz!

Thank you to Almut Kelber and Miguel Maravall for serving as examiners!

Seifert M^§, Baden T, Osorio D. The Retinal Basis of Vision in Chicken. Sem Cell Dev Biol. direct link. (preprints.org version).  pdf.

Congratulations to Tessa Herzog and George Kafetzis for winning this year’s Talk and Posters awards, respectively, at the annual Sussex Life Sciences PhD symposium!

The awards recorgnise Tessa’s work on in vivo synaptic function of photoreceptors, and George’s ventures into trying to understand the retinal basis of vision in sharks!

For a flavour, see their recent conference posters below!