📚Take-home message: Axonal regeneration is more than growth. It’s also about the cellular environment.
Want to find out more? doi.org/10.3389/fnin...
To reduce the extensive scarring, we performed a partial optic nerve transection in young adults, leaving a portion of the nerve uninjured.
This approach indeed limited scar formation, and it allowed regenerating axons to reach the brain and reinnervate their targets. ✅
Why does this happen? 🔎 A gliofibrotic scar forms at the injury site, an injury response typically associated with mammals.
So the axons keep growing, but they physically and chemically can’t overcome the barrier. The result: permanent vision loss.
Even more intriguing: the retinal ganglion cells in killifish retain their intrinsic growth potential. 🧐
However, instead of navigating towards the brain, they misdirect and loop within the retina (yellow arrowheads).
Adult killifish — both young and old — fail to reinnervate their brain target after complete optic nerve transection. 🐠🧠👁️
This is surprising, as most teleost fish are able to fully restore neural circuitry and regain visual function after this type of injury.
🚨Paper Alert!
Check out our latest work, now published in @FrontiersNeuroscience. We show how this remarkable fish surprisingly displays mammalian-like injury responses after optic nerve transection.
🔗 doi.org/10.3389/fnin...
@JulieDeSchutter @StevenBergmans @lucamasin.bsky.social @AnyiZhang
A new preprint from our lab is out! 🥳 Congrats to Anyi Zhang and @lucamasin.bsky.social for this great paper titled: Repressed mTORC1 signaling and transient dendritic pruning support axonal regeneration! Grateful for the fruitful collaboration with the @filodelbene.bsky.social and Poulain labs!
With transcriptomic and functional data, @lucamasin.bsky.social et al. @labmoons.bsky.social show that local glycolysis supports injury-induced axonal regeneration. rupress.org/jcb/article/...
📕 In Cellular Neurobiology collection: rupress.org/jcb/collecti...
#SfN25
All these data were generated by an updated version of RGCode, RGCode2. An automated cell counting platform able to reliable count murine, zebrafish and killifish retinal ganglion cells using RBPMS and Rbpms2 as marker!
Killifish, a gerontology model shown to lose its regenerative capacity with age, displays a unique biphasic RGC loss profile. Both young adult and old killifish present with a similar degree of RGC loss during the first wave. Old fish, however, lose more RGCs during the second wave.
After optic nerve crush (ONC), mice lose ~80% of their RGC by 14 days post injury (dpi). In contract, zebrafish retain nearly all RGC during the first two weeks, before presenting with late RGC degeneration (~13%) by 21dpi.
Comparing mice, zebrafish and killifish, we were able to determine the differences in retinal ganglion cell (RGC) density between species. Fish species of an equivalent life stage have a five-fold higher density compared to mice. With age, RGC density decreases in killifish.
🚨🚨 Paper alert! Check our latest work published in @FrontNeurosci and find out how different species respond to optic nerve injury!! doi.org/10.3389/fnin... 🚨🚨
@JulieDeSchutter @AnyiZhang2 @PieterJanSerneels @lucamasin.bsky.social @StevenBergmans
🐟 2025 Nothobranchius Symposium – End of the registration coming soon
Be part of #Notho25 in beautiful #Jena, Germany from June 5-6, 2025 to share the latest in #killifish #aging #research.
🚨 Registration deadline: May 1, 2025
➡️ Website & registration: notho-2025.de
