Bruno van Swinderen

Professor Bruno van Swinderen received his PhD in Evolutionary and Population Biology in 1998 from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His graduate work was on general anesthesia in a Caenorhabditis elegans model, applying both quantitative genetics and molecular genetic approaches. For his postdoc at The Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, California (1999-2003), he switched to Drosophila melanogaster to develop methods of studying perception in the fruit-fly model. He ran a lab at NSI from 2003 to late 2007. Professor van Swinderen established a new laboratory at the Queensland Brain Institute in February 2008. Bruno van Swinderen's group use Drosophila as a genetic model system to study mechanisms of perception in the brain and are interested in three phenomena: selective attention, sleep, and general anesthesia. Their focus is on visual perception and how it is affected by these different arousal states. Their current effort is in understanding how sleep regulates selective attention and predictive processing. Toward this goal, they use various novel visual paradigms in a Drosophila molecular genetics context. The lab is also focussed on understanding presynaptic mechamisms of general anaesthesia, with a view to uncovering new strategies to improve recovery from this common medical procedure. Attention and memory: Behavioral choices result from an ongoing interplay between attention and memory. We have developed paradigms to study visual attention and memory in Drosophila, thereby allowing us to investigate this complex problem in a powerful genetic model. Two levels of investigation are involved: behavior and brain electrophysiology. Behavioral screening methods allow us to determine visual responsiveness levels resulting from gene mutations or drug treatments, and electrophysiology in individual flies identifies brain processes affected by our manipulations. Our goal is to identify mechanisms of visual attention, and to elucidate how these processes interact with memory systems. Anesthesia and sleep: We all sleep, and many of us require anesthesia during surgery at some point in our lives. However, the function of sleep is unclear, and the mechanism of general anesthesia remains mysterious. Our insight into brain processes modulating visual perception in Drosophila is applied at an electrophysiological level towards understanding sleep and general anesthesia, when perception is lost. We approach this problem by targeting candidate molecular systems at the level of molecular lesions and pharmacology.

[2025] Presynaptic neurotransmission: a bottleneck to recovery from general anesthesia?. van Zundert, André A. J., Cylinder, Drew M. and van Swinderen, Bruno (2025). Presynaptic neurotransmission: a bottleneck to recovery from general anesthesia?. Anesthesia and Analgesia, 142 (1) 07695, 56-63. doi: 10.1213/ane.0000000000007695 [2025] Wakefulness can be distinguished from general anesthesia and sleep in flies using a massive library of univariate time series analyses. Leung, Angus, Mahmoud, Ahmed, Jeans, Travis, Fulcher, Ben D., van Swinderen, Bruno and Tsuchiya, Naotsugu (2025). Wakefulness can be distinguished from general anesthesia and sleep in flies using a massive library of univariate time series analyses. PLoS Biology, 23 (7 July) e3003217, 1-32. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003217 [