Christian Monroy Hernández

Program: Neurosciences

Current advisor: Yehuda Ben-Shahar, PhD

Undergraduate university: University of New Orleans, 2018

Enrollment year: 2020

Research summary
The role of ERG-like potassium channel sei in behavioral robustness to acute heat stress

We aim to understand how seizure (sei), an ERG-like potassium channel in Drosophila, regulates behavioral robustness to acute heat stress. Exposure to fast increase in ambient heat can cause neuronal hyperexcitability and trigger seizures in animals. Poikilotherms like Drosophila are particularly susceptible to heat stress, as their internal temperature varies alongside environmental fluctuations. To maintain robust behavioral outputs and avoid seizures, Drosophila neuronal system must have homeostatic mechanisms against heat-induced hyperexcitation. The way hyperexcitation resilience is encoded at a neural system levels is still unknown. We hypothesize one of two non-mutually exclusive possibilities: behavioral robustness to acute heat stress depends on 1) cumulative resilience of all neurons, or 2) resilience of specialized neurons. We aim to test these hypothesis in the Drosophila cholinergic system, which we have previously identified as necessary to maintain behavioral robustness.

Graduate publications
Farrants H, Shuai Y, Lemon WC, Monroy Hernandez C, Zhang D, Yang S, Patel R, Qiao G, Frei MS, Plutkis SE, Grimm JB, Hanson TL, Tomaska F, Turner GC, Stringer C, Keller PJ, Beyene AG, Chen Y, Liang Y, Lavis LD, Schreiter ER. 2024 A modular chemigenetic calcium indicator for multiplexed in vivo functional imaging. Nat Methods, 21(10):1916-1925. PMCID: PMC11466818