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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · 22d

🔵 I'm interrupting my social media hiatus to flag this important preprint from the Bruchas lab (is he not on Bluesky!?) together with @davidweinshenker.bsky.social. Very difficult experiments to show that dopamine release from LC terminals is independent of VTA 🔥
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

www.biorxiv.org

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Jun 27

This preprint has been under review >110 days... I think they can't find reviewers.

WOULD YOU BE WILLING TO SERVE AS A REVIEWER?

If you're keen, I'd propose your name to the editor...

Please re-post

Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 11

How much analgesia is needed to manage pain levels in mice after brain surgeries?

A single dose of meloxicam seems to be enough. Even the addition of opioids cannot provide a clear benefit. (in line with recent work from others, see cites in our preprint): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

GrimACE: Automated, multimodal cage-side assessment of pain and well-being in mice

Pain and welfare monitoring is essential for ethical animal testing, but current cage-side assessments are qualitative and subjective. Here we present the GrimACE, the first fully standardised and aut...

www.biorxiv.org

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Jun 18

I'd have so much to complain about these days. But given the state of affairs in the world, it feels inappropriate to whine about daily hassles. So let me just say this on behalf of everyone who is struggling but otherwise safe: fucking hell.

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · May 5

Wait for the ride to Zurich, it's a gorgeous journey through vineyards! Unfortunately, there is no sunshine tomorrow...

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Apr 9

🔵 Interesting new work from @davidweinshenker.bsky.social on why locus coeruleus neurons might be vulnerable to degeneration in humans (Alzheimer's) but not in mice. And a new approach on how this could be modelled in mice through human tyrosinase overexpression: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Tyrosinase-induced neuromelanin accumulation triggers rapid dysregulation and degeneration of the mouse locus coeruleus

The locus coeruleus (LC), the major source of norepinephrine (NE) in the brain, is among the earliest site of pathology in both Alzheimers disease (AD) and Parkinsons disease (PD), and it undergoes ca...

www.biorxiv.org

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 17

Impression from the evening panel discussion at #ESC2025. Amazing talks today, wonderfully open and fun atmosphere. After all these years, still my favorite meeting in the conference cycle ❤️

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Reposted by Johannes Bohacek

Drew Schreiner @schreinerdrew.bsky.social · Mar 17

Dopamine and acetylcholine interactions - so hot right now! Tour de force work from Steph Cragg's group out in NN (lead Yan-Feng Zhang). They find Cholinergic Interneurons (ChIs) largely suppress DA release, distinct from what we just reported in songbirds (1/x)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 16

Stellar women-only (💪) panel on stress and development, loaded with cutting-edge multiomic data kicking off the European Stress Conference #ESC2025 in Innsbruck, Austria

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 11

Thanks Damien! But careful, not in the homecage, we still use an external setup. It's built to prioritize animal welfare and standardization, featuring a dark and safe environment, video recordings through infrared-permeable walls, built-in infrared light-source, slide-and-lock system, software...

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Reposted by Johannes Bohacek

Marija Kundakovic @kundakoviclab.bsky.social · Mar 11

My lab is hiring 2 postdocs on an NIH-funded grant characterizing molecular & cellular changes in the human brain across menopausal transition. Other neuroepigenomics projects are also available. We plan to hire a wet lab scientist and a bioinformatician. Please RT!
kundakoviclab.com
More info 👇

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 11

By the way: To tackle this question, we have developed an automated pain and welfare monitoring system (combining "mouse grimace scale" and full-body pose-estimation with behavior flow analysis). Brilliant work by Oliver Sturman, the ETH 3R-Hub and our collaborator Katharina Hohlbaum. 💪

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 11

Notice that modest pain levels remain detectable with the grimace score for 24hrs after surgery. Neither meloxicam (5mg/kg) nor the combination of meloxicam(5mg/kg)+buprenorphine(0.1mg/kg) could eliminate these remaining pain levels. We detect strong side-effects from opioid treatment (hyperactive).

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 11

How much analgesia is needed to manage pain levels in mice after brain surgeries?

A single dose of meloxicam seems to be enough. Even the addition of opioids cannot provide a clear benefit. (in line with recent work from others, see cites in our preprint): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

GrimACE: Automated, multimodal cage-side assessment of pain and well-being in mice

Pain and welfare monitoring is essential for ethical animal testing, but current cage-side assessments are qualitative and subjective. Here we present the GrimACE, the first fully standardised and aut...

www.biorxiv.org

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

And saving the best for last: We integrate these results with previously published bulk and single-cell data from our lab and make these data freely accessible and searchable through an interactive app (ethz-ins.org/stressome2). This is a very large resource, we hope people like it - please share! 🙏

StressomeExplorer2

ethz-ins.org

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

On a single-cell level, we reveal blunted chromatin accessibility changes after chronic stress for cAMP signaling, and a damped response that returns to baseline much faster for glucocorticoid receptor binding. This again points to two parallel mechanisms of habituation.

heatmap showing blunted chromatin accessibility at the GR-response element (GRE) next to blunted transcription of the GR-target Fkbp5, on a single-cell level across cell types

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

We replicate the profound damping of transcription on a single-cell, multi-omic level (24 biological samples), showing remarkable cell-type specificity in stress-induced transcriptional changes and diverse temporal dynamics. Estimating cellular activity we find that fewer neurons get activated.

Estimation of cellular activity using an "activity dependent transcription" score.

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

Bioinformatic and experimental approaches (based on temporal dynamics and transcription factor analysis) identify two parallel, independent mechanisms of habituation: an early blunting due to cAMP signaling, a late blunting related to corticosterone signaling at the glucocorticoid receptor.

habituation profiles of individual genes

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

We find that the transcriptional stress response shows dramatic habituation in every single animal, leading to profound blunting of every stress induced gene. Habituation is already established after 10 days. There is no emergence of adaptive responses, and no change in baseline gene expression 😱!

Heatmap showing transcriptomic response across 192 samples

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

First, we profiled the transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility response to an acute restraint stress challenge over time. Then we repeated this after 10 and 20 days of stress exposure (192 biological samples for transcriptomics, 32 for ATAC-seq).

Experimental design of dynamic stress profiling

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 6

I’m trilled to release the largest amount of stress profiling data from our (I think any) lab so far. We asked how the molecular response to acute stress adapts as the stressor becomes chronic. Multiomic profiling in the mouse hippocampus, led by Rebecca Waag and co-last author Pierre-Luc Germain 💪

bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · Mar 5

Distinct molecular mechanisms of stress habituation in the mouse hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.04.641433v1

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 4

Uuuhh... DANNCE is back! Now social-DANNCE. Looks very cool, taking multi-animal tracking and analysis of social behavior to a whole new level. Just the green-room multiple-camera setup looks quite complex, I wonder how easy this can be replicated in other labs. Will certainly spark excitement!

Bence Ölveczky @olveczky.bsky.social · Mar 4

Excited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8

Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 4

Don't get too excited David... no noradrenaline data this time 😅🫣.

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Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 4

nope.

Johannes Bohacek @bohaceklab.bsky.social · Mar 4

yes, we are all watching in disbelief, sorry ☹️. But thanks for the encouragement, Cate! We're about to dump a ton of data into the scientific aether, I just wasn't sure if anyone was still watching. May it provide some distraction from the madness...

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Reposted by Johannes Bohacek

KalischLab @kalischlab.bsky.social · Dec 4

SAVE THE DATE: #resilience2025 - the 11th International Symposium on Resilience Research - Mainz, Germany - September 24-26, 2025

Satellite methods workshop: September 23 & many opportunities for early-career researchers

Meet the stress resilience research community, get latest insights, spur you

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