Biology subjects

Burger, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Burger, F..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Cap-specific second nucleotide ribose methylase CMTR2 is required for transcriptome transition during mammalian germline development

Eukaryotic RNA polymerase II transcripts carry a signature m7G cap (Cap0) structure that is co-transcriptionally added to the 5 end, and is essential for translation and RNA stability. Higher eukaryotes carry additional essential ribose methylations on the first and second cap-proximal nucleotides, termed as Cap1 and Cap2, respectively. The ubiquitous Cap1 modification protects cellular RNAs from being recognized by the innate immune sensors. Cap2 is also implicated in such an innate immune role, but here we use our genetic analyses of two human cell lines and three mouse tissues to reveal that loss of CMTR2 does not result in activation of the innate immune response. Germline deletion of mouse CMTR2 shows that it is required for male and female fertility. While mutant germ cells proceed into the meiotic pachytene spermatocyte stage, their transcriptome fails to keep pace and transition from the preceding leptotene/zygotene stages. Such a meiotic role is not conserved in other vertebrates like zebrafish, as cmtr2 mutants are fertile, instead it has a role in defining sex, as all mutants are exclusively males. Taken together, our study reveals that CMTR2 does not influence innate immune response in human cells and mouse tissues, but shapes gene expression during developmental transitions.

molecular biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Multimodal Human Perception of Object Dimensions: Evidence from Deep Neural Networks And Large Language Models

Object recognition in the human visual system is implemented within a hierarchy characterised by increasing feature complexity. Here, we investigated whether human-derived dimensions of object knowledge show a similar progressive emergence across layers in deep neural networks (DNNs), and how this emergence is shaped by architecture, learning objective, and stimulus statistics. To test this, we predicted human-derived dimensions from layer-wise activations of multiple DNNs and transformer models trained on large-scale datasets. Results showed that trained DNNs exhibit emergence profiles resembling theoretical expectations from human vision, with behaviourally relevant object dimensions largely absent in early layers, strengthening across layers, and peaking in later layers. Architectural mechanisms such as recurrence and skip connections amplified this encoding, learning objectives redistributed information across layers, and changes in stimulus statistics confirm that hierarchical emergence is a general principle extending to material perception. These findings demonstrate that the hierarchical emergence of human-derived dimensions is a fundamental property of trained networks and highlight design and input factors that shape layer-wise representational organisation, providing hypotheses for the structure of visual representations in the brain.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Broadband synergy versus oscillatory redundancy in the visual cortex

The cortex generates diverse neural dynamics, ranging from broadband fluctuations to narrowband oscillations at specific frequencies. Here, we investigated whether broadband and oscillatory dynamics play different roles in the encoding and transmission of visual information. We used information-theoretical measures to dissociate neural signals sharing common information (i.e., redundancy) from signals encoding complementary information (i.e., synergy). We analyzed electrocorticography (ECoG) and local field potentials (LFP) in the visual cortex of human and non-human primates (macaque) to investigate the extent to which broadband signals (BB) and narrowband gamma (NBG) oscillations conveyed synergistic or redundant information about images. In both species, the information conveyed by BB signals was highly synergistic within and between visual areas. By contrast, the information carried by NBG was primarily redundant within and between the same visual areas. Finally, the information conveyed by BB signals emerged early after stimulus onset, while NBG sustained information at later time points. These results suggest a potential dual role of BB and NBG cortical dynamics in visual processing, with broadband dynamics supporting nonlinear pattern recognition and oscillations facilitating information maintenance across the cortex.

neuroscience↗