Fly studies were again led by the amazing Dr. Natalia Dominik (check out her recent JCI paper too!), with help from Dr. Simon Lowe in the lab. 🪰 Thanks once more to @ukri.org (MRC) for funding this fly work!

This work was led by my fantastic colleague Prof. Andrea Cortese @uclqsion.bsky.social, alongside ourselves and Emmanuele Crespan's group at the Institute of Molecular Genetics IGM-CNR.

This work was led by Dr. Natalia Dominik (who also led the Drosophila studies 🪰) and Dr. Stephanie Efthymiou, in collaboration with the Houlden, Lamarche-Vane, and Reilly groups @uclqsion.bsky.social and at McGill University, and leading clinicians throughout the world. Happy to see this published!

We are also very grateful to @ukri.org (MRC and BBSRC) for funding this research! 🙏

We hope that researchers, members of the public, and policymakers, interested in 1. how environmental contanimants may influence neurological disease, and 2. the interaction between memory and sleep, find these works of interest.

We suggest that this is consistent with a well-known postulated function of sleep: the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. Overall, our data reveal an additional mode of memory - in addition to episodic, procedural, and aversive memory - that can be influenced by sleep.

Simon's work extends the range of sensory modalities in which habituation can be investigated. As importantly, we also found an unexpected role of night time sleep in modulating habituation. In essence, the less night sleep flies have, the slower they habituate to mechanical stimuli 🤔.

In pre-print no. 2, Simon has devised a novel protocol to measure habituation to mechanosensory stimuli in Drosophila.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Habituation is an ancient form of non-associative memory that has been widely studied in flies, but primarily to visual and olfactory stimuli.

MNPs are increasingly bioaccumulating in human tissues, particularly the brain. Simon's work suggests a concerning possibility: that humans harbouring mutations causing neurological diseases associated with mitochondrial dysfunction (such as PD) may be particularly vulnerable to rising MNP levels .

Simon's work provides proof-of-principle using a Drosophila model that ingestion of micro/nano-plastics (MNPs) - ubiquitous contaminants that disrupt mitochondrial function and cause oxidative stress - can enhance the pathogenic effects of genetic mutations causing Parkinson's Disease (PD).

This project was entirely devised and undertaken by Simon as a 'side project', which he introduced to us in almost complete form during a very memorable lab meeting 😲.

We are particularly interested in showcasing the work of early career researchers performing fundamental investigations into dystonia mechanisms and treatments. Check out the website above to register, and please send potential talk/poster abstracts to the organiser (😉).