Sogawa, S. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2025

Optimizing automated detection for cytoplasmic TDP25 aggre-gates in fluorescence imaging

Protein aggregates are known to disrupt normal cellular functions and homeostasis, serving as key hallmarks of various neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimers disease, Parkinsons disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Automated detection of cytoplasmic, disease-associated aggregates in fluorescence images is crucial for characterizing these aggregates and exploring potential strategies for their prevention. In this study, we demonstrate that removing background fluorescence and improving the brightness of aggregates significantly enhances the detection efficiency of cytoplasmic aggregates formed by the 25 kDa C-terminal fragment of ALS-associated TDP-43 (TDP25) using an automated aggregate detection algorithm. A high signal-to-noise ratio can improve detection efficiency. Our findings contribute to the development of more effective detection methods for disease-associated aggregates of heterogeneous sizes and fluorescence intensities, which are typically challenging to identify automatically.

biophysics↗

bioRxiv2024

The influence of sleep disruption on learning and memory in fish

Sleep is ubiquitous across animal taxa. Strong evolutionary pressures have conserved sleep over the evolutionary history of animals, yet our understanding of the functions of sleep still largely derives from mammals and select laboratory models. Sleep is considered to play an important role in mental processes, including learning and memory consolidation, but how widespread this relationship occurs across taxa remains unclear. Here, we test the impact of sleep disruption on the ability of the cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) to both learn and then remember a novel cognitive task. We found a significant negative relationship between sleep disruption and the ability to learn a food reward choice system. Specifically, we found that fish in a disturbed sleep treatment took significantly longer and made more incorrect decisions when finding the food reward, compared to individuals in a non-disturbed/normal sleep treatment. In contrast, the differences between the two treatment groups were non-significant when fish where tasked with remembering the food reward several days later. Our results demonstrate a negative impact of sleep disruption on performance in a cognitive challenging task and that the effects were strongest when fish were first exposed to the challenge. Importantly, we show that the association between sleep and mental processes, such as learning, may be widespread across vertebrate taxa and potentially have an early origin in the evolutionary history of animals.

animal behavior and cognition↗