Our Advanced Marine Biology course unifrBiology - #PiVR meets #deepLabCut meets marine invertebrates! A group of fantastic students doing quantitative behavior analysis - from the field to the lab Gaëlle Botton-Amiot Nikita Komarov @DerPaule2009

Very pleased to see this paper published, which describes and interprets a very weird and wacky fossil as an early medusozoan cnidarian. A tour de force in dealing with a difficult and headache inducing fossil by Y. Zhao! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pa…

cool new PhyloPic.org alert: Nematostella vectensis by Gaëlle Botton-Amiot phylopic.org/images/927676f…

A chemical regularly used to image cells can dramatically alter the way cellular compartments called condensates look under the microscope. elifesciences.org/articles/85671…

Exciting finding: Associative learning in the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… PNASNews

Thus, already animals that did not yet evolve a brain, but contain a net-like nervous system are able to learn. An exciting project with Gaëlle Botton-Amiot and Pedro Martinez DeepLabCut 🦄 meets Cnidarians!

Brainless learning: According to a study, sea anemones can learn & remember an association between light and electric shocks. The evolution of associative learning may predate the emergence of centralized nervous systems, according to the authors. In PNAS: ow.ly/nVRe50No7kB

In this issue: How red flour beetles recycle water in their rectums, how whale sharks may have adapted to deep-sea diving, and associative learning in starlet sea anemonies. ow.ly/H9KJ50NugJq

Our Nematostella picture made the cover of PNAS! credit to Gaëlle Botton-Amiot pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Every time I hear about Mangold & Spemann I am reminded of the forgotten contribution of Ethel Browne 15 years before them. See: DOI: 10.2307/1542490. Original paper: Browne, E. 1909. The production of new hydranths in hydra by the insertion of small grafts. J. Exp. Zoo/. 7: l-37

From the most fabulous Zeynep, Pedro Jacob, Nils Otto et al. They fleas dae braw things wi thir wee heids. nature.com/articles/s4158…

There are still are 5 days to apply for a PhD in my lab to work on the evolution of the monoaminergic system findaphd.com/phds/project/t… please apply and RT

Very happy to have finally defended my PhD a few weeks ago at Uni Fribourg ! A special thank you to my supervisor simon-sprecher.bsky.social for his guidance along the way 🪼🔬🧬, and to all my friends and colleagues for this joyful ending 🥳🥳🥳

Operant conditioning in box jellyfish - cnidarian behavior is definitely less "simple" than we may think 😄 nature.com/articles/d4158…

Talking to Alexandra about learning in brainless animals for France Culture was a super fun experience! Thanks again for asking me!

So excited to be attending #cellbio2023 !!! Want to discuss how cool are brainless animals? Come check out my poster and see my talk! 📌Poster P1389 - Sunday, Dec3, 12:15-14:45pm 🗣️Talk - Wednesday, Dec 6, 9:25am

Now switching to holiday mode🎄🏙️and heading to NYC after #cellbio2023, the head full exciting science 🤯! Many thanks to Cell Evolution Team and BoWangLab for organising this last session , and @LS2Switzerland and SCNAT for giving me this fantastic opportunity! pic.x.com/BXr3tNS1ZG