Topic: postural stability

Maintaining posture is a vital challenge for all freely-moving organisms. As animals grow, their relationship to destabilizing physical forces changes. How does the nervous system deal with this ongoing challenge? Vertebrates use highly conserved vestibular reflexes to stabilize the body. We established the larval zebrafish as a new model system to understand the development of the vestibular reflexes responsible for balance. In this talk, I will begin with the biophysical challenges facing baby fish as they learn to swim. I’ll briefly review published work by David Ehrlich, Ph.D., establishin