FOCUS In Sound #36: Leenoy Meshulam cover art

FOCUS In Sound #36: Leenoy Meshulam

FOCUS In Sound #36: Leenoy Meshulam

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FOCUS In Sound #36: Leenoy Meshulam Octopus during active sleep video: https://www.oist.jp/video/octopus-during-active-sleep Welcome to FOCUS In Sound, the podcast series from the FOCUS newsletter published by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. I’m your host, science writer Ernie Hood. In this edition of FOCUS In Sound, we get to know a young researcher who in 2022 was the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund CASI award, the Career Awards at the Scientific Interface. Those awards recognize outstanding scientists who have made significant contributions at the interface of biology and quantitative sciences, bridging the gap between disciplines, and fostering innovation. It’s a five-year grant totaling $500,000. Leenoy Meshulam is a theoretical physicist who is also interested in biological phenomena, especially nervous systems and the brain. She explores the interface between physics and neuroscience. She received her PhD from Princeton University, after completing her master’s degree in physics and biology at Tel Aviv University. She is now a Swartz postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle. Leenoy’s research endeavors have already taken her in some fascinating directions, which we will hear all about, including a remarkable recent publication about the sleeping habits of octopuses. Leenoy Meshulam, welcome to FOCUS In Sound! LEENOY: Hi Ernie. It’s very nice to be here. ERNIE: Let’s start with your latest accomplishment as a co-author of a paper in the journal Nature called “Wake-like skin patterning and neural activity during octopus sleep.” Tell us about the overall findings… LEENOY: So this paper concentrates on a main finding where we saw that the octopus, much like in other animals, actually has two stages of sleep. So we managed to prove that every about hour the octopus goes into a different kind of stage of sleep—an active sleep bout, where similarly to REM sleep for humans, for example, the type of brain waves and the neural activity changes, and this is accompanied by a lot of color and pattern changes on the skin of the octopus while the octopus is still asleep. And so the way the cycle looks is, we have about an hour of sleep that is not the active part, and then a few minutes bout kind of like REM, with lots of color changes on the skin, different kind of neural activity that accompanies it, and then back to the stage that is most of the sleep. Something to keep in mind is that this is the first time that neural activity was recorded in this way in the brain of an octopus. So this is a sleeping octopus we managed to put a Neuropixel in, which means that there is an electrode inside the brain of the octopus that’s, we’re able to filter brainwaves out of to see what the signals look like. Also to see spikes in the brain of the octopus. And we can really see the activity of the brain while this is happening. So it’s both the underlying activity of sleep and the behavioral aspect of the two stages of sleep, and very high-resolution filming of the pattern changes on the skin of the octopus. The skin of the octopus is normally a system that we’re looking at for things like the camouflage of the octopus, right. This is why it has the ability to change so much color to have these coordinated, beautiful patterns that look like the coral reef that it is trying to match behind it. It also has texture changes there. And we just didn’t know before that this happens during the sleep of the octopus. So there are just these bouts of color changes that happen during sleep. ERNIE: So you were really able to correlate the visual and the brain phenomena? LEENOY: Exactly. So this is the underlying neural activity to this active sleep bout that makes it so interesting, because we can actually look at what is happening in the brain and show that this is really sleep. You can really see when you’re looking, if you look at the plotting in the paper, you can see the immediate, sharp transition into active sleep that is change in the neural activity, and if you’re looking at the brightness of the color of the body of the octopus, you can immediately see a drop, because it starts having color instead of being transparent. So the transition is immediate and is completely synchronized. ERNIE: Just so everyone is aware, we will post a link to video of the sleeping octopus along with this podcast. It’s well worth seeing! Leenoy, I understand that these findings point to the idea of convergent evolution. Would you elaborate? LEENOY: There are multiple elements of the system of the octopus that are similar to what we see in other animals. And because the cephalopods, which is the family the octopus is part of, so that’s cuttlefish, octopus, and squid—these are the cephalopods—the convergence in the evolutionary tree from us, for example, we’re talking 600 million years ago. That is around the time that on earth we moved from ...
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