It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, May 02, 2025
The Duke mouse brain atlas will accelerate studies of neurological disorders
A new “atlas” developed by researchers at Duke University School of Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, and the University of Pittsburgh will increase precision in measuring changes in brain structure and make it easier to share results for scientists working to understand neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
The tool, the Duke Mouse Brain Atlas, combines microscopic resolution, three-dimensional images from three different techniques to create a detailed map of the entire mouse brain, from large structures down to individual cells and circuits.
“This is the first truly three-dimensional, stereotaxic atlas of the mouse brain,” said G. Allan Johnson, PhD, Charles E. Putman University Distinguished Professor of Radiology at Duke. He is also professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Stereotaxic roughly means “in life,” or that the atlas accurately represents the brain as it appears in a living mouse, with external landmarks that can guide experimental procedures.
The atlas is needed because different types of imaging have their own pros and cons, Johnson said. Some can provide a high-resolution view of single brain cells, but that view is distorted by the tissue preparation and scanning, making it difficult to compare results to those from others’ work. “The atlas provides a common space to which many different types of data can be registered so that it’s correctly oriented and undistorted,” he said.
The details are reported April 30, 2025, in the journal Science Advances.
Other Duke authors of the study are first author Harrison Mansour, a programmer/analyst in the Duke Center for In Vivo Microscopy, and Leonard E. White, associate professor in neurology.
Anyone can download and use the atlas in a range of open-source display packages. “Grade school students can appreciate the beauty of the brain, and neuroscientists can obtain much more accurate measures of brain changes,” Johnson said.
For instance, researchers are currently using the atlas to follow neurodegeneration in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and environmental exposure to toxic metals and pesticides.
To create the atlas, the researchers started with MRI, using diffusion tensor imaging to capture three-dimensional images of five postmortem mouse brains at the highest resolution ever reported (15 microns), Johnson said. Imaging strategies and hardware developed over the past 40 years at the Duke Center for In Vivo Microscopy allowed the researchers to capture these images at a resolution 2.4 million times higher than clinical MRIs.
They then merged these images with microCT scans of the mouse skull to pinpoint key “boney landmarks.” Finally, they removed the brains from the skull to allow the use of light sheet microscopy to map cells in the same space.
“The combination of all three methods, at the highest spatial resolution in the same space, provides one of the most comprehensive maps of the mouse brain ever developed,” Johnson said.
Fish are masters of coordinated motion. Schools of fish have no leader, yet individuals manage to stay in formation, avoid collisions, and respond with liquid flexibility to changes in their environment. Reproducing this combination of robustness and flexibility has been a long-standing challenge for human engineered systems like robots. Now, using virtual reality for freely-moving fish, a research team based in Konstanz has taken an important step towards that goal.
“Our work illustrates that solutions evolved by nature over millennia can inspire robust and efficient control laws in engineered systems,” said first author Liang Li from the University of Konstanz. Co-author Máté Nagy from Eötvös University underscores this: “The discovery opens up exciting possibilities for future applications in robotics and autonomous vehicle design.”
Deciphering nature’s hidden algorithm Using a virtual reality (VR) setup that mimics natural schooling, researchers placed individual juvenile zebrafish into networked arenas where each fish could freely interact with “holographic” virtual conspecifics. Each virtual fish was a projection of a real fish from another arena, meaning that fish could swim and interact together in the same virtual world. The fully immersive 3D environment lets researchers precisely manipulate visual stimuli and record how the fish respond. This high level of control allowed the scientists to isolate exactly which cues the fish were using to guide their interactions with other fish. In other words, they could reverse engineer the behaviour of schooling in zebrafish to understand how fish solve the complex problem of coordinating their motion.
The solution they discovered was a simple and robust law based only on the perceived position, not the speed, of their neighbors to regulate their following behaviour.
“We were surprised by how little information the fish need to effectively coordinate movements within a school,” says Iain Couzin, senior author on the study and Director of MPI-AB and Speaker at the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour. “They use local rules that are cognitively minimal, but functionally excellent.”
To see just how realistic the control law was, the team tested it with real fish. They conducted a VR “Turing test”, based on the concept of testing whether people can tell if they are interacting with a real human or with artificial intelligence. In the aquatic Turing test, a real fish would swim with a virtual fish that switched between being real and being controlled by the algorithm they discovered. The real fish could not tell the difference. They behaved the same whether interacting with a real conspecific or the virtual follower governed by the algorithm.
From fish to machines To test the broader utility of their discovery, the team embedded it in swarms of robotic cars, drones, and boats. The robots were tasked with following a moving target using either parameters from the zebrafish algorithm or from a state-of-the-art method used in autonomous vehicles called Model Predictive Controller (MPC). Across all tests, the natural control law that fish have evolved delivered performance that was nearly indistinguishable from MPC in terms of accuracy and energy consumption – but at a fraction of the complexity.
Oliver Deussen, a co-author on the study and Professor in computer science at the University of Konstanz and Speaker at the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour: “This work highlights the reciprocal relationship between robotics and biology – using robotics to explore biological mechanisms, which in turn can inspire new and effective robotic control strategies.”
Key facts:
Embargoed: Not for release until Wednesday, 30 April 2025, 14:00 U.S. Eastern Time
Original publication: Liang Li, Máté Nagy, Guy Amichay, Ruiheng Wu, Wei Wang, Oliver Deussen, Daniela Rus, and Iain D. Couzin, Reverse engineering the control law for schooling in zebrafish using virtual reality, published in Science Robotics, 30. April 2025
The research was led by scientists at the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB), Germany, in collaboration with researchers at MIT in the United States and Eötvös University in Hungary.
The research was funded, among others, by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Messmer Foundation Research Award from the Werner and Erika Messmer Foundation.
The Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz is a global hotspot for the study of collective behaviour across a wide range of species and across scales of organization. It is a Cluster of Excellence within the framework of the German Excellence Strategy of the federal and state governments.
“The Matrix” for fish: Researchers placed individual zebrafish into networked virtual reality arenas where each fish could freely interact with “holographic” virtual conspecifics.
A new study, led by Peter Søgaard Jørgensen from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, reveals that while global cooperation remains essential, countries have more power than previously believed to reduce antibiotic resistance through effective domestic interventions. Currently only a handful of countries are taking sufficient action.
The study is the first to assess the level of government intervention needed to improve the worsening situation on antibiotic resistance across 73 countries. The researchers find strong associations between the level of action a country reports and whether antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance increased during a 16-year period in the start of the 21st century.
Measures that curb resistance
A wide set of measures like monitoring antibiotic use, improving hospital hygiene, coordinating action across human health and livestock production, and investing in new treatment strategies are all likely to be needed to curb resistance at the national level.
“Too often, we hear that antibiotic resistance is an inevitable catastrophe beyond our control,” says Jørgensen. “But our study tells a different story—one of hope and agency. If countries act decisively, they can still make a difference,” continues Peter Søgaard Jørgensen.
Countries leading the way
The study shows that a handful of countries are leading the way, taking the necessary level of action to have a better than even chance to see reductions in resistance across the board. In 2016 those countries were the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and UK. Six years later, in 2023, Japan, France, Malaysia and Denmark, have become the countries that are taking the most extensive actions.
“A positive trend is that between 2016 and 2023, 76% of all analysed countries, and 83% of low- and middle-income countries, were reporting to ramp up their actions,” says Peter Søgaard Jørgensen.
Every action counts
Although the findings indicate that high levels of action are needed to achieve reductions in antibiotic resistance, the research also finds that even incremental increases in action can be important. For every improvement in action, the magnitude of increases in resistance goes down and countries get closer to achieving a reduction in levels of resistance.
“The study’s findings send a clear message to policymakers: the time to act is now. By taking evidence-based steps, governments can protect their own citizens while also contributing to the global fight against resistant infections,” says Peter Søgaard Jørgensen.
Peter Søgaard Jørgensen is a senior researcher at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, and the Deputy Executive Director of the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere programme (GEDB) at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
This study is a collaboration between leading institutions such as OneHealthTrust, Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, University of Geneva, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and the GEDB programme at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The study in a nutshell:
The study compared self-reported levels of action among 73 countries with changes in antibiotic resistance and use during the period 2000 to 2016. The scientists then looked at how levels of action had changed from 2016 to 2023 to see if the same countries were still taking the same level of action. Additional research is needed to evaluate the effects of action levels in 2023.
Levels of action on antibiotic resistance in 73 countries investigated in the study. An action index close to 3.7 is needed to have a better than an even chance of reducing antibiotic resistance across the board.
Levels of action on antibiotic resistance in 73 countries investigated in the study. An action index close to 3.7 is needed to have a better than an even chance of reducing antibiotic resistance across the board.
National-level policies can reduce the impact of antibiotic resistance across diverse countries, according to a study published April 30, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Peter Søgaard Jørgensen from Stockholm University and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Sweden, and colleagues.
Antibiotic resistance is a major public health concern, contributing to 1.27 million deaths per year. In 2016, countries around the world committed to developing and implementing national action plans to combat antibiotic resistance. These plans have been criticized for not being fully operationalized. Assessing their impact is challenging—change doesn’t happen overnight, not all countries report their data systematically, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted monitoring.
In this study, researchers used the Global Database for Tracking Antimicrobial Resistance Country Self- Assessment Survey (TrACSS) and data on antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance to evaluate the impact of national action over time in 73 countries, representing six continents across high and low-middle income countries. They looked at national trends in indicators related to antibiotic resistance, including antibiotic use, rates of antibiotic resistance, and impact of resistant infections.
By assigning each country an action index, they found that national action was consistently associated with improved indicators of antibiotic resistance. These associations persisted after controlling for factors like socioeconomic conditions, population density, and climate.
Since 2016, both high and low-middle income countries have become more ambitious with their national action plans; only one-third have decreased their efforts to reduce antibiotic resistance.
The authors noted some bias in their sample size in that high-income countries are more likely to have established monitoring systems but stressed the importance of studies like this to establishing the impact of national policies on tackling antibiotic resistance.
The authors add: “Our research shows the importance of all countries taking additional action to address antibiotic resistance. Very ambitious action will be needed to achieve reductions in resistance, but even incremental improvements will help reduce the projected increases…We were not sure that it would be possible to reduce levels of antibiotic resistance while also keeping using antibiotics to the extent that is required by modern health systems, but our research indicates that it is indeed possible.”
###
In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Global Public Health: https://plos.io/3Gv8DR4
Citation: Søgaard Jørgensen P, Thanh LN, Pehlivanoğlu E, Klein F, Wernli D, Jasovsky D, et al. (2025) Association between national action and trends in antibiotic resistance: an analysis of 73 countries from 2000 to 2023. PLOS Glob Public Health 5(4): e0004127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004127
Author Countries: Sweden, Switzerland, United States
Funding: We acknowledge funding from the Erling-Persson Family Foundation (P.S.J., L.N.T., E.P., F.K.), the European Union (ERC, INFLUX, 101039376, P.S.J.), the IKEA Foundation (P.S.J.), the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (P.S.J) and the Uppsala Antibiotic Centre (UAC, L.N.T.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authorities can be held responsible for them. We thank SESYNC for support for the Living with Resistance pursuit, which this paper is a product of.
