Inlay

Curator of zoology at Museum of Evolution (Uppsala University), in charge of the Linnaeus collection, marine biologist (sponges), naturalist and wannabe natural product researcher.

Magic moment at the end of our LIVE dive today when a Dumbo octopus appeared in front of the hydrothermal chimneys at 2400 meter depth! 😮 Just....Wow If you have missed our dive today on Loki's Castle, hydrothermal vents at 2400 meter depth, you can still watch it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMPJ...

We are back about 11 hours more south, and we are back on the western side of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, on another completely unexplored seamount: the “Boytsov Seamount” (Boytsov (1929–2004), a Russian hydrographer and Arctic researcher). We just landed at 2400 meter depth 🙂

We are back LIVE, this time at "Aegir’s Spring” (Aegis Kilde), at 2300 m depth right on the Arctic mid-Atlantic Ridge. This hydrothermal vent site was discovered in 2015, and contains white and black smokers! Enjoy😊 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffac...

Hi everyone, our third LIVE dive is now! Today we are on Mohns Treasure, an inactive sulfide mound at 2400-2800 m. Located 30 km southwest of the active Loki’s Castle vent field. We already saw this morning the iconic dumbo octopus 🐙 ! @greenpeace.org @uu.se

This natural product study started in 2018 and it took us a while to understand these #sponge #knottins! Peptides in deep-sea sponges are super interesting but challenging 😅 Congrats to the Gunasekera Lab in Uppsala 🙌

Sea conditions could not be better this morning in the Norwegian Sea 😊 We are now heading even more north (76 degrees North) to an unexplored mountain, so unexplored that it doesn't even have a name yet! We'll be the first humans there...⭐ @greenpeace.org @biodiversa.eu @sponbiodiv.bsky.social

Two new activities for #barettin, extracted from my pet sponge 'Geodia barretti' : promising activity against 1) chronic pain and 2) the most common and aggressive type of pancreatic cancer! Two papers from the Cartmell Lab👇 www.mdpi.com/1660-3397/24... doi.org/10.1021/acs....

Knottins are stable, structurally constrained mini-proteins with diverse bioactivities. This work presents the first report of a novel family of knottins, ‘stryphnines’, from the deep-sea sponge Stryp...

Despite increasing interest, there remain limited treatments for chronic pain, with opioids continuing to be one of the top prescribed medications. Marine natural products present a wealth of untapped potential for new treatments for chronic pain. In this study, we investigated the analgesic effects of the sea sponge ligand barettin in a mouse model of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). Barettin exhibited efficacious antihyperalgesic activity in male mice with no efficacy shown in females. Through the use of a PRESTO-Tango assay, we found that barettin acts as an inverse agonist at the 5HT2A receptor while also presenting no activity at the μ-opioid receptor. Head twitch experiments confirmed no hallucinogenic activity, suggesting that barettin may be a promising nonopioid, nonhallucinogenic, marine-derived therapeutic agent for the treatment of chronic pain.