We thank our postdoc Natalie Roberts for leading a stimulating lab-meeting today on #colour #vision and #opsin genes in damselflies and other insects for members of #SvenssonLab and #TsuboiLab.
In the evening some of the lab members went to Café Ariman in Lund and later to see the movie "The Apprentice" at #Kino in #Lund
Just One Molecule Allows Us to See Millions More Colors Than Our Pets
https://www.sciencealert.com/just-one-molecule-allows-us-to-see-millions-more-colors-than-our-pets #color #vision #red #opsin #thyroid #RetinoicAcid
If you too like #opsin evolution, check our new #bioinformatics tool #Matreex to visualize the evolution of complex gene families, illustrated by the evolution of vertebrate red-sensitive visual opsins https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.18.529053v1.full #SMBE2023
Marjorie Liénard: method to express invertebrate opsin proteins in vitro, allowing to show spectral shifts in opsins in butterflies, with notably 2 paralogs of LW providing differentiation in function between the dorsal and ventral parts of the eye https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2008986118 #SMBE2023 #opsin #GeneDuplication #paralog
Our favourite #Platynereis #opsin now in the mammalian brain as a new #optogenetic tool!
"Here we ... found that the Platynereis dumerilii ciliary opsin ... is an efficient, versatile, light-activated bistable GPCR that can suppress synaptic transmission in mammalian neurons with high temporal precision in-vivo "
#Matreex can be used for teaching, as here with the classical example of opsin evolution: notice the parallel loss of blue- and green-sensitive opsins in snakes and mammals, the duplications in frugivorous old-world primates, and the duplications and losses in fishes according to habitat. #opsin #MolecularEvolution
5/thread
Hot off the press! Move over deep homology, what about ‘deep diversity’? We review the vast variation of visual system development and physiology.
