[Seminar] Tiny Walkers, Big Survivors: Building a Toolkit to Illuminate Brain and Behavior in Tardigrades by Dr. Ana Lyons

Title: 

Tiny Walkers, Big Survivors: Building a Toolkit to Illuminate Brain and Behavior in Tardigrades

Abstract:

  Tardigrades are microscopic animals with remarkably compact nervous systems, yet they coordinate articulated limbs, navigate their environments, feed, grasp substrates, and survive extreme physiological states. Their combination of behavioral complexity, small size, and extraordinary stress tolerance makes them an intriguing system for asking how miniaturized nervous systems coordinate movement, transform sensation into action, and suspend and restore neural and behavioral function under extreme environmental stress. In this seminar, I describe efforts to build a systems-neuroscience toolkit for tardigrades. This includes developing a cell-resolved neural atlas using RNA in situ methods, expansion microscopy, and computational segmentation, as well as efforts to establish optical reporters of neural activity, including GCaMP. I will also discuss comparative neuroethology across tardigrade species, including the development of a behavioral ethogram and comparisons among species that differ in body size, transparency, behavior, ecology, and stress tolerance. The goal is to identify complementary experimental models suited to different biological questions, rather than relying on a single “standard” tardigrade. Finally, I discuss complementary work on tardigrade freeze tolerance and how these approaches may eventually allow us to visualize how neural circuits reorganize, shut down, and recover as animals enter and emerge from extreme states. Together, these projects aim to establish tardigrades as a tractable comparative system for neuroethology and to ask how a tiny nervous system produces surprisingly rich behavior while remaining embedded in one of the most stress-tolerant animals on Earth.

Speaker:

Ana Marie Lyons, PhD
Stellar Science Global Science Scholar
Keio University, Institute for Advance Biosciences; RIKEN IMS