Impression from the evening panel discussion at #ESC2025. Amazing talks today, wonderfully open and fun atmosphere. After all these years, still my favorite meeting in the conference cycle ❤️

Stellar women-only (💪) panel on stress and development, loaded with cutting-edge multiomic data kicking off the European Stress Conference #ESC2025 in Innsbruck, Austria

Thanks Damien! But careful, not in the homecage, we still use an external setup. It's built to prioritize animal welfare and standardization, featuring a dark and safe environment, video recordings through infrared-permeable walls, built-in infrared light-source, slide-and-lock system, software...

By the way: To tackle this question, we have developed an automated pain and welfare monitoring system (combining "mouse grimace scale" and full-body pose-estimation with behavior flow analysis). Brilliant work by Oliver Sturman, the ETH 3R-Hub and our collaborator Katharina Hohlbaum. 💪

Notice that modest pain levels remain detectable with the grimace score for 24hrs after surgery. Neither meloxicam (5mg/kg) nor the combination of meloxicam(5mg/kg)+buprenorphine(0.1mg/kg) could eliminate these remaining pain levels. We detect strong side-effects from opioid treatment (hyperactive).

On a single-cell level, we reveal blunted chromatin accessibility changes after chronic stress for cAMP signaling, and a damped response that returns to baseline much faster for glucocorticoid receptor binding. This again points to two parallel mechanisms of habituation.

We replicate the profound damping of transcription on a single-cell, multi-omic level (24 biological samples), showing remarkable cell-type specificity in stress-induced transcriptional changes and diverse temporal dynamics. Estimating cellular activity we find that fewer neurons get activated.

Bioinformatic and experimental approaches (based on temporal dynamics and transcription factor analysis) identify two parallel, independent mechanisms of habituation: an early blunting due to cAMP signaling, a late blunting related to corticosterone signaling at the glucocorticoid receptor.

We find that the transcriptional stress response shows dramatic habituation in every single animal, leading to profound blunting of every stress induced gene. Habituation is already established after 10 days. There is no emergence of adaptive responses, and no change in baseline gene expression 😱!

First, we profiled the transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility response to an acute restraint stress challenge over time. Then we repeated this after 10 and 20 days of stress exposure (192 biological samples for transcriptomics, 32 for ATAC-seq).

This quote is the reward of agreeing to review a PhD thesis on very short notice. I had exactly the same experience, I just couldn't have phrased it so well. #Psychedelics

It's that time of year, I'm updating my lectures and I have weird questions.

BACKGROUND:
I've used this graph for many years to joke that sex is more stressful than anything else (and to make the more serious point that CORT levels are a poor readout for stress). ars.els-cdn.com/content/imag...

Intro: we work on the acute stress response, with a focus on the #LocusCoeruleus, #behavior and multiomics.

Back on the birdsite we started the tradition of science trailers. This was our first video back in 2020: #Rammstein and #neuroscience ... Volume to 11! 🔊​

www.nature.com/articles/s41...