25 February 2025

To commemorate the 100^th birthday of Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB) in 2023, The Company of Biologists and JEB launched two new grants to champion the emerging talents in comparative physiology and biomechanics. One of our inaugural grant awardees is Erin Leonard from Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Erin was a recipient of the Early-Career Researcher (ECR) Visiting Fellowship, which provides funding for a junior faculty member setting up their first lab to attract an early-career researcher from another location to undertake a research project in their lab for up to three months. In 2024, the ECR Visiting Fellowship gave Erin the opportunity to recruit Andrew Thompson, a postdoc in Dr Joanna Wilson’s lab at McMaster University, Canada, to work on a project which deepens our insight into the evolution of how specialised sensing cells regulate vertebrate cardiorespiratory systems.

Fish gills have specialised cells that sense oxygen, amongst other internal signals, and can automatically respond by changing breathing, heart rate and blood pressure accordingly. These reflexes are crucial for fish to maintain a stable internal environment. Andrew and Erin demonstrated that oxygen-sensing cells in fathead minnows can be directly stimulated by leptin, a hormone involved in hunger sensing and glucose regulation in vertebrates. “This research has expanded our current understanding of neuroepithelial cells and further emphasises their role as general sensors influencing the cardiorespiratory systems of vertebrates,” says Erin.

Andrew and Erin demonstrated the broadening of the role of neuroepithelial cells by growing specialised fathead minnow gill cells and measuring the rise in intracellular calcium, a vital step in chemosensing, upon the addition of leptin using fura-2 intracellular calcium imaging. “Allowing measurement of changes of intracellular calcium on a per cell basis over time is a powerful technique to elucidate and characterise gases and metabolites that stimulate these chemoreceptive cells, as well as characterise the pathways involved, which is essential for my research program,” reveals Erin. Not only did Andrew get a chance to learn a state-of-the-art technique, but, impressively, he was also able to expand this technique to another fish model. “Andrew performed intracranial injection of the fura-2 marker to record forebrain activity in live yellow perch larvae in response to light,” comments Erin. Overall, this collaboration proved fruitful, and was only the beginning, as Andrew went on to join the Leonard lab in the autumn of 2024 as a postdoc to continue this research.

New junior faculty members must cope with becoming lab leaders, setting up their independent lab from scratch, setting up their courses, teaching and recruiting simultaneously. “When Andrew came to my lab, I was a relatively new faculty member (less than one year into my tenure track position) and so I had few students and not much of my lab set-up,” notes Erin. Andrew’s arrival aided Erin in setting up her lab. “I was lucky to have no teaching for the semester he was joining me, so the grant really helped me focus my efforts in getting equipment purchased and the lab set-up for experiments,” recalls Erin. Overall, the ECR Visiting Travelling Fellowship from JEB provided an invaluable opportunity for Erin to establish her first independent lab in more ways than one.

“Receiving the JEB grant to bring an early-career researcher into my lab was transformative for my career. It not only accelerated my lab’s research capacity but also fostered a collaborative environment that led to new ideas and directions.”