School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Dr. Xitong Liang, Assistant Professor, School of Life Sciences, Peking University
Talk Title: Neural control of cephalopod camouflage

Date: 19 December 2024 (Thursday)
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 2, G/F, Laboratory Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Michael Hausser

Biography

Dr. Xitong Liang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Life Sciences, Peking University. He received B.S. in Biology from Peking University and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis, USA, where he studied Drosophila circadian neural circuits using light-sheet microscopy. As a postdoc with Gilles Laurent at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, he started to work on the cephalopod neurobiology, particularly on the neural control of color change and camouflage behavior in cuttlefish and squid. His general research interest is the diversity and evolution of animal behavior and neural circuits.

Abstract

Cephalopods (e.g., octopus, squid, and cuttlefish) have the remarkable ability to change their skin color and pattern within seconds for camouflage or communication purposes, by controlling the size of millions of skin pigment cells called chromatophores. Our study tracked over 100,000 chromatophores in behaving cuttlefish and revealed an exploratory and iterative approach to optimize their camouflage skin pattern, through visual estimation of the difference between their body and the background. Furthermore, we compared cuttlefish with another cephalopod species lacking complex skin patterns and identified evolutionary divergence in the neural circuit for skin pattern control between the two. These findings start to uncover the organizing principles underlying the generation of high-dimensional motor outputs, from an extraordinary nervous system that has evolved independently from our own for over 600 million years.

ALL ARE WELCOME.