We are delighted to announce that Raffaele Sarnataro and Peter Hasenhuetl – two postdocs in the Miesenböck group – are among this year's "Emerging Neuroscientists" selected by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (SWC) in London. For this highly competitive seminar series (each year four talks are selected from an international pool of applications), the SWC invites "aspiring leaders in neuroscience to present their research to the SWC community in London".
In their joint talk "Neuronal and metabolic dynamics underlying sleep homeostasis", they will describe how sleep pressure, which has a metabolic origin [1], is represented and conveyed to downstream circuits by oscillatory dynamics [2] of sleep-promoting neurons of Drosophila.
"This is a wonderful opportunity to present our findings and to put them into the wider context of other homeostatically-regulated behaviours and sleep in other species", says the team.
References and additional information:
1. Sarnataro R, Velasco CD, Monaco N, Kempf A, Miesenböck G (2025) Mitochondrial origins of the pressure to sleep. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09261-y
2. Hasenhuetl PS*, Sarnataro R*, Vrontou E, Rorsman HO, Talbot CB, Brain R, Miesenböck G (2024) A half-centre oscillator encodes sleep pressure. bioRxiv. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.23.581780 [*shared first authorship]
Peter Hasenhuetl's publications: Link to Google Scholar
Raffaele Sarnataro's publications: Link to Google Scholar