Photo credits: Marion Lebouvier
07.10.2024 New technology helps investigate the impact of noise pollution on our oceans! Our team is developing new tools to monitor the behavior of Ciona and Oikopleura larvae and adults, while exposing them to different levels and ranges of anthropogenic noise. You can read more about this work here.
Photo credit: Marion Lebouvier
04.10.2024
The DeuteroNoise Mid-Term Meeting this year took place in Bergen! We hosted around 20 DeuteroNoise consortium members for half a week during which we discussed the progress of the project. You can read more about the meeting here.
21/09/2024 Our favorite animals made it to this year’s Forskningsdagene in Bergen’s city center. They were popular and made a good impression to the visitors of the the Michael Sars Centre stand. Cionas are great model organisms to study the evolution of chordate sensory modalities and the impact of human activities on the health of our oceans.
19/09/2024 We participated in the 13th Nordic EMBL Partnership meeting that took place between the 17th and 19th of September. Marios presented the recently published work of Jorgen. Our postdoc Emily presented her very nice work from her time in the Lynagh lab. You can read a nice article about the meeting here.
31/8/2024
Publication Alert!
We have contributed to a new publication by the lab of Prof. Daniel Chourrout. This paper investigate the role of Pax3/7 gene in the tunicate Oikopleura dioica.
22/08/204
Publication Alert!
We have just published our 1st peer-reviewed developmental biology paper! Well done to 1st author Zonglai Liang (PhD student in the lab who has now graduated) and 2nd author Daniel Dondorp our ex-department engineer. You can read the paper here.
Simplified overview of the uptake routes of teflubenzuron from Schultze et al. 2024
22/07/2024
Publication Alert! We contributed to a recent publication led by Sabrina Schultze and Katrine Borga from UiO, Department of Biosciences. You can read the paper here.
Copyright: Sofia Caetano Avirtzer and Science Connected Magazine
28/05/2024 Nice popular science write up of our Current Biology paper by Sofia Caetano Avritzer (PhD student in the Maimon Lab at Rockefeller University) for the Science Connected Magazine.
27/05/2024
Today we hosted Professor Cristian Canestro in our lab. Cristian is a collaborator on the JPI Oceans Deuteronoise project. We had a great time brainstorming about ongoing and future experiments.
Chatzigeorgiou lab members during the One Ocean Week 2024 event
14/04/2024
We participated in the One Ocean Week events with an animal exhibition focusing on the DeuteroNoise project. Marion and Mel wrote a very nice piece about this activity and other related activities of the Center. You can find here.
27/02/2024
New Group Picture! We thank Melanie Burford for taking the latest group picture. We are grateful to have so many interns from UiB, HVL and from abroad.
23/02/2024
Night Walk at the Aquarium outreach: We presented the JPI Oceans DeuteroNoise project to children during an evening visit at the Bergen Aquarium
08/02/2024
Jorgen’s paper has been published online in Current Biology. Together with Kushal, Athira, Daniel, Zonglai and intern Meike, Jorgen demonstrated that Ciona is using polymodal sensory cells to sense diverse natural chemical and mechanical cues that are critical for settlement and metamorphosis. You can read a nice write-up about the paper by Marion Lebouvier and Melanie Burford here.
17/01/2024
Today we welcomed our new Master student Ingrid Cavazos who will be working on the JPI Oceans Deuteronoise project. Ingrid is a student of the joint master program, "International Master in Marine Biological Resources (IMBRSea)" with Atlantic Technological University in Galway Ireland and Ghent University in Ghent Belgium.
08/01/2024
Today we welcomed our new postdoc Sissel Norland. Sissel will work on the JPI Oceans Deuteronoise project, focusing on the effects of anthropogenic noise on Tunicate behavior and physiology.
08/01/2024
Today we welcomed to the lab 3 students from HVL. Kristian Klette, Tor Magnus Haldaas and Ryan Le will be carrying their Bachelor Thesis in our lab. Their task will be to build new behavioral setups for Cionas!
Behavioral analysis of cercaria.
18/12/2023
Today our latest manuscript was published in the journal Communications Biology. We performed a neurobiological analysis of the fish parasite, Cryptocotyle lingua. We found that the genome of this parasitic species is equiped with streamlined signaling pathways and lacks key pathways, including nitric oxide signaling, shedding light on trematode host-infection adaptations.
06/10/2023
Today we had the privilege of hosting and showing around the lab the Scientific Advisory Board of the M. Sars Centre. They showed particular interest in the behavioral experiments of our intern Celestine Allombert-Blaise.
29/09/2023
We are delighted that our NIVA collaborators Maria Hultman and Tânia Gomes are visiting this week! With the help of PhD student Andreas Midlang, they are here to learn more about the development and behavior of tunicates.
18/09/2023
Our article on ascidians as bioindicator organisms for evaluating the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals is out! A fruitful collaboration between our group and researcher from NIVA.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141113623002982
Adult Cionas
05/07/2023
Happy to share a preprint from Jorgen Hoyer. Using whole-brain imaging, mechanical and chemical stimulation as well as a series of behavioral and chemogenetic assays Jorgen discovered that Ciona has polymodal sensory neurons that mediate larval attachment and metamorphosis.
You can read more here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.03.547492v2.full
18/06/2023
Happy to share the preprint of our postdoc Oleg Tolstenkov on how parasitic trematodes, alter their behavioral repertoire and nervous system complexity at the molecular and cellular levels, to adjust to their complex life cycle.
You can read more here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.17.545403v1.full
01/06/2023
Carl presented his work on the mechanobiology of the developing chordate nervous system at the M. Sars Centre 2023 Symposium.
21/01/2023
Happy to share a preprint from the PhD work of Zonglai Liang. Using cell type specific CRISPR/Cas9, confocal microscopy, calcium imaging and electrophysiology Zonglai discovered that Anoctamin-10 in necessary for convergent extension and tubulogenesis during C. intestinalis notochord formation.
You can read more here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.20.524945v1.full
19/12/2022
Good news! Our JPI Oceans consortium grant has been funded. Our project is called Deuteronoise. This grant will fund the work of a postdoc in our lab who will study the effects of anthropogenic noise on marine invertebrate species (C. intestinalis, O. dioica).
05/09/2022
Exciting news! We have received funding from the Norwegian Research Council to map the sensory processes underlying settlement and metamorphosis in a marine environment using our favorite organism Ciona intestinalis.
05/08/2022
Our paper on Ciona intestinalis behavior has just been published in PLOS Biology. Olivia our intern from France did an amazing job collecting lots of data that Athira, Daniel and Jerneja the three co-first authors analyzed. Well done to all!
12/11/2021
Our Mesmerize platform manuscript is finally published in Nature Communications. Well done to Kushal Kolar and coauthors for this team effort. Much of it was carried out during the pandemic.
Mesmerize: Calcium imaging software (click on the picture to go to the documentation)
13/11/2019
Our 2nd preprint is out! Kushal with the help of Daniel have created a platform for performing calcium imaging analysis. Using Mesmerize you can go seamlessly from raw data all the way to e-figures. We incorporate some cutting edge tools like the CaImAn library but we also add new analysis tools such as k-shape clustering. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/840488
The first authors: Jerneja and Daniel, Photo Credit: Sars Centre
20/02/2019
Daniel’s and Jerneja’s Ciona behaviour paper has just been published in Scientific Reports. You can read a short summary of the paper by Mari Bergsvåg on the Sars Centre website by clicking here.
08/01/2019
We have new Bachelor thesis students in the lab. They come from HVL in Bergen and they will be working with Jørgen to automate our lab’s Ascidian facility. Currently, feeding the animals and taking care of the algae is fairly labor intensive. By introducing automation we hope to make our work in the facility much easier. At the same time we hope to provide the animals with more stable and reproducible housing conditions. Anders, Martin, Audun, Ole and Jan, welcome!
19/12/2018
Our collaborative effort with our Italian friends from the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples has just been published in Developmental Biology!
QR Code for 10.1101/382465
02/08/2018
Our first preprint is out! Jerneja and Daniel together with the help of last summer's interns Louise and Sonia produced a very nice story, providing a quantitative description of Ciona intestinalis larval behaviour.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/382465