Annika Reads

Also...🚨THIS IS PAPER #730!!!🚨 I really read, and tweetorialized, 730 papers in 730 days! Stay tuned for statistics and the top 20 favorites of 2021-22. You can see all the papers I've read here, with links to tweetorials: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

I can't justify staying in this space. This account will be deleted within the next ~48 hours as soon as I have a current backup of my tweets for my personal notes. I'd love to see you on 🦋! Or email me your papers! Or see me IRL!

I don't log in here more than once every 6 months or so - find me elsewheres on the internets.

If you missed hearing about papers - I got you! July special edition #papers365 on Bsky! Username is annikabarber.

Annika is still reading, but mostly board books because she has a new grandbaby and is helping with grand baby #1! Will return to tweeting papers when I'm done with "But Not the Hippopotamus." 🦛

@party_mcfly_ My search terms find all!

Desert Drosophila have hard lives...and they sleep more! @party_mcfly_ and not-on-twitter colleagues in the Donlea lab show that D. mojavensis not only sleeps more than melanogaster, they *increase* sleep with food and water deprivation. 🪰🌵doi.org/10.1101/2023.0…

Many animals show sleep *loss* during stress, but D. mojavensis sleeps more during nutritional stress and this seems to provide survival advantages. Mechanism TBD, but could be related to waste clearance or energy use. A cool new phenomenon to understand sleep evolution!

But *why* do desert flies sleep more? They turn out to be very resilient to food and food+water deprivation, with elevated sleep time upon nutrient deprivation. Survival during nutrient deprivation was correlated with increased sleep in the Mojave subspecies.

All this suggests that flies have miRNA regulated tuning of cotransmission in Glu- and GABA-ergic neurons, which may be dynamically regulated by environmental conditions, allowing neurons to rapidly change the magnitude or even sign (Glu & GABA are inhibitory, ACh is excitatory).

Another piece of evidence used a split GFP on VGAT and VAChT, which would only assemble and fluoresce if both transporters were in the same vesicle and there is signal, which increases in older flies (30 days).

I love a co-transmission mystery story, and @GriffithFlyLab delivers! Gal4 reporters suggest that glutamatergic and gabaergic fly neurons also express acetylcholine. But fluorophore-tagged transporter genes show no overlap...the secret sauce is microRNA. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv…

Just so y'all know, I also read fiction, and I keep a spreadsheet of that too. Unlike papers, I give everything book a 1-5 rating! 🔥 (Or DNF if it's really bad).