Gut Chatter: New MCB professor Abhinav Sur Wants to Know What Your Intestinal Cells Are Saying to Each Other
What if the secret to understanding some of the most debilitating gut diseases was hiding inside a tiny, see-through fish? That's a bet Abhinav Sur is making — and the University of Arizona just gave him the lab to help solve that mystery.
Zebrafish larva
In May 2026, the MCB Department welcomed a new faculty member. Assistant Professor Abhinav Sur is introducing a new species to Arizona’s research landscape: the zebrafish.
Sur arrived in Tucson via Clark University in Massachusetts and most recently a postdoctoral position at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. In his early studies, his interests were in ecology and evolutionary biology. During his Masters’ studies he spent time tracking elephants in Southern India and studying the epidemiology of a virus devastating cardamom plants in the Himalayas. His early instincts were those of a naturalist — endlessly curious about the living world. That curiosity eventually carried him to his PhD in Biology at Clark University, where Sur was introduced to a marine worm by the name of Capitella teleta. Through that humble worm, Sur found himself asking one of biology's grandest questions: how did nervous systems evolve? To investigate this question, Sur turned to a then-cutting-edge tool: single-cell RNA sequencing. At NIH, Sur continued to employ this technology but changed the subject: Enter the zebrafish.
Zebrafish in an aquarium
Sur: “I generated a comprehensive dataset across 62 stages of zebrafish development where I profiled every single gene in every single cell, as a single zebrafish fertilized embryo becomes a feeding, swimming, and behaving animal over a span of five days”. When he analyzed around half a million single-cell transcriptomes, something jumped out. Buried in the data was a cell type that looked familiar: BEST4 cells, first discovered in humans just two years earlier and strongly linked to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Strikingly, these cells are absent in mice – long the default animal model for gut research – but Sur along with other labs in the US and Canada found these cells in zebrafish. They have since turned up in several other species, from rats to yaks, and even sturgeons, hinting at an evolutionary story that is just beginning to be told.
Now, in Tucson, Sur plans to continue this work and is setting up the first zebrafish research facility in Arizona, the Sur Gut Chatter Lab. Gut chatter? Sur explains: “I want to understand how different cells are talking to each other to coordinate their function.” The gut, it turns out, is not a passive tube. It is a dynamic, chattering community of specialized cells, each playing a distinct role — and when the conversation breaks down, disease follows.
Bringing the fish to Arizona is no small feat. Bringing a live animal model to a region without existing infrastructure means building from scratch: water systems, quarantine protocols, breeding conditions, all of it. As of early June, Sur is on the verge of bringing in the first batch of fish, “thanks to the tireless efforts and dedication of the University Animal Care staff at U of A”, he stresses. The fish will be in quarantine before settling into their new home at the Animal Health Sciences Center.
A transparent fish, a newly discovered cell type, and some very important conversations to eavesdrop on.
Why zebrafish? In addition to possessing the enigmatic BEST4 cells that mice lack, zebrafish have several other advantages. One is speed: Within five days, their gut is fully formed and functioning – that takes weeks in mammalian models. Zebrafish has all the cell types in the gut that a human intestine has and shares 75% of all the genes that are implicated in human disease. This makes them powerful for modelling human gut diseases. Their cells can be switched on or off individually or in combination, with a precision that's nearly impossible in larger mammals. Also, zebrafish are transparent in the larval stage. Sur: “Observing them is live-action developmental biology!” You can watch a gut assemble itself in real time, in a living animal, under a microscope.
As to what we can expect from this new lab, Sur explains: “My lab will pursue three interlocking questions. First, how are specialized gut cells born, and how do they end up exactly where they need to be? Second, how do these cells communicate to keep the gut running smoothly? Third: what happens when that communication or development goes wrong?”
The answers matter enormously. Diseases like Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis affect millions of people worldwide, yet their root cause remains murky. Sur sees the gut as a machine with many interdependent parts: Specialized cells are the crucial parts that keep this machine running the right way. “If one part is not working properly, the whole thing falls apart.”
Because gut diseases are so multifaceted, involving immunology, development, and microbiome all at once, Sur plans to connect across disciplines: “I would love to collaborate with clinical gastroenterologists and other clinicians bridging the worlds of basic science and patient care.
Sur is excited to bring zebrafish to Tucson: “I think having the zebrafish model around gives a lot of traction because there is a live optically transparent animal model that we can use to model diseases.”
Welcome, Abhinav Sur! – Learn more at the Sur Gut Chatter Lab website