Biology subjects

Iovino, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Iovino, B..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

gene2fish: a multi-gene spatial expression browser for in situ hybridization data across zebrafish development

Single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) atlases of zebrafish development have catalogued marker genes for hundreds of cell types, but transcriptomic data alone cannot reveal their expression patterns in the embryo. The systematically annotated Thisse high-throughput whole-mount in situ hybridization (ISH) collection at ZFIN provides spatial expression data across twelve developmental stages, yet the ZFIN web interface is organized around individual genes, making side-by-side cross-gene comparison laborious. We present gene2fish, a web application that displays ISH images from the Thisse dataset, linked directly to their ZFIN records, in a gene-by-developmental-stage grid. With gene2fish, researchers can quickly explore and validate the spatial expression of marker gene lists, and find the genes annotated to specific anatomical structures across developmental time. The application is part of Zebrahub and is freely available at https://zebrahub.sf.czbiohub.org/gene2fish.

developmental biology↗

bioRxiv2026

DanioDecima: A DNA sequence-to-function model of zebrafish embryogenesis

Deep learning DNA sequence-to-function models offer the promise of gaining mechanistic insights into genome regulation, however their performance is often limited by data scarcity in the species of interest. We present DanioDecima, a zebrafish-specific model leveraging transfer learning from human and mouse-trained models to predict tissue- and cell-type-specific gene expression during zebrafish embryogenesis. Initializing DanioDecima with pretrained human and mouse Borzoi and Decima weights raises the median pseudobulk Pearson r sub-stantially across cell-types and improves gene-level correlations of test set genes. An in silico directed-evolution loop guided by DanioDecima scoring generated synthetic promoters whose motif architectures cluster by the expected target lineage. These findings exemplify a cross-species transfer learning methodology for sequence-to-function models, and position DanioDecima as a practical resource for zebrafish regulatory engineering.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2024

Zebrahub-Multiome: Uncovering Gene Regulatory Network Dynamics During Zebrafish Embryogenesis

During embryonic development, gene regulatory networks (GRNs) drive molecular differentiation of cell types. However, the temporal dynamics of these networks remain poorly understood. Here, we present Zebrahub-Multiome, a single-cell multiomic atlas that captures chromatin accessibility and gene expression from 94,562 cells across six stages of zebrafish embryogenesis (10-24 hours post-fertilization), capturing key developmental stages from the end of gastrulation to the onset of organogenesis. By measuring regulatory element activity alongside transcriptional output from the same cells, we identify 640,000 cis-regulatory elements organized into 402 hierarchically structured modules corresponding to specific developmental pathways. Early embryonic stages employ broadly shared regulatory programs that progressively fragment into lineage-specific modules. Timeresolved gene regulatory network inference reveals that transcription factors undergo functional transitions - from multilineage regulators to specialized, lineage-committed factors. These quantitative measurements reveal the regulatory network rewiring that drives cell fate specification. Our interactive web portal (zebrahub.org/epigenomics) enables exploration of gene dynamics, regulatory networks, and perturbation predictions, providing a quantitative framework for understanding vertebrate developmental regulation.

developmental biology↗