David Schoppik

THREAD: Falls are a major public health problem — a top-20 cause of death in the US. Wonder what scientists are doing about that? @yunluzhu & colleagues in my lab developed powerful new tech to understand balance & evaluate therapeutics.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.07.523102v1
Want to know more / watch neat movies? 1/9

#mastopiece #neuroscience #balance #drosophila #celegans #zebrafish

Thx for boosting (we’re trying to outdo that other place)!

Jan 18, 2023 at 12:47amWeb
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
One of the best “discovery” tools in biology is a small animal screen. It’s a way to rapidly evaluate interventions in animals like fish/flies/worms to find good candidates for clinical trials. Read more here: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/nrd4627 . Now, since gravity is universal, all those small animals one might screen have to maintain balance! One big problem: existing apparatus isn’t good enough at measuring posture. So we got to work! 2/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
@yunluzhu developed a new Scalable Apparatus to Measure Posture and Locomotion (SAMPL) with new hardware designs and open source acquisition and analysis software optimized for vertical imaging. 3/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
SAMPL works great with flies and fish and worms. Check out this image of analyzed video showing different behaviors as animals move up/down. 4/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
And these awesome movies! Watch those critters go! 5/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
To be useful, SAMPL has to be able to parameterize balance behaviors. @yunluzhu showed how the data reveals deep insights into how fish climb/dive to explore and how they maintain posture. 6/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
@yunluzhu discovered that fish with different genetic backgrounds vary how they maintain posture but that these differences are small relative to how the same fish vary as they develop. 7/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
Finally, @yunluzhu took a big step towards rigorous & reproducible science: he simulated how much data SAMPL needs to collect to see meaningful differences in behavior and found it takes SAMPL only two weeks’ worth of data to see meaningful differences! Now we (and other labs) can get started on discovering how brains learn to balance, and how drugs & other interventions can make that better/worse. 8/9
Show threadDavid SchoppikJan 18, 2023
Thanks to co-authors Franzi Auer, Hannah Gelnaw, Sam Davis, Kyla Hamling, Christina May, Hassan Ahmed, Niels Ringstad and Katherine Nagel, funding from NIDCD and NINDS and support from the Neuroscience Institute at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine. I'll update this with handles if/when people make them. Thanks for reading! 9/9