Stress resilience and behavioral recovery in larval zebrafish

Research overview

Stress is a universal experience, but recovery from it is not. Some individuals bounce back quickly while others show prolonged disruption. Understanding the biological basis of this variability is important for both basic neuroscience and for informing how we think about resilience in broader biomedical contexts.

Using larval zebrafish as a model, this work developed a behavioral framework for quantifying stress resilience as the rate and extent of locomotor recovery after acute osmotic stress. The transparency of the larval zebrafish brain then allowed whole-brain neural activity to be mapped and linked to individual differences in behavioral rebound.

Key contributions

• A standardized stress assay and resilience scoring framework based on locomotor rebound dynamics
• Characterization of inter-individual variability in stress recovery at the behavioral level
• Whole-brain activity mapping using pERK/tERK ratios, atlas registration, and region-level quantification
• Identification of neural correlates of resilience variation through multivariate and network-based analysis
• Reproducible Python pipelines for behavioral feature extraction, brain image analysis, and statistical modeling

Methods

The experimental pipeline included high-throughput behavioral tracking, acute stress protocols, immunohistochemistry for neural activity markers, confocal imaging, atlas-based brain registration, and computational analysis spanning dimensionality reduction, permutation testing, functional connectivity, and graph-theoretic metrics.

The thesis was supervised by Florence Kermen at the Department of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen. The manuscripts arising from this work are currently in preparation.