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Grubb Lab,
MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology,
King's College London,
New Hunt's House,
Guy's Hospital Campus,
London.
SE1 1UL
UK
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October 2010: Imaging and open access
Our confocal is up and running, and
producing some quality images. Have a
look at our new gallery page where some of the best are up for public viewing.
We also had a little paper out this month,
describing an optogenetic tool Matt made during his post-doc in the Burrone
lab. 'Channelrhodopsin-2
localised to the axon initial segment' describes a targeting strategy that successfully got ChR2 to the AIS, but
unfortunately never allowed us to control neuronal activity in the way we'd
hoped. Still, we've described the
construct in the Open Access journal PLoS
ONE, and
made it freely available from Addgene,
so with a bit of luck someone might just find a use for it...
September 2010
After a pretty quiet summer holiday period,
we're all back in the lab and moving things along nicely. Most excitingly, late September saw the
arrival of our newest lab member: a beautiful Zeiss confocal microscope. Here she is in all her pristine glory –
stunning cellular images to come as she accelerates the pace of our research no
end (fingers crossed)...
And congratulations to Annisa who passed
her PhD viva at the Royal Veterinary College last month! I'll try and persuade Dr. Chand to put up a
PDF of her thesis, entitled ' Developmental expression and functional
requirement of pituitary guanylyl cyclase-B (GC-B) and
calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) in vivo and in vitro',
once it's all finalised.
July 2010: Yaba GABA do!
Mark finished his 1st-year PhD lab rotation
with us this month, looking at the effects of GABAergic neurotransmission at
the axon initial segment (AIS) in primary neuronal cultures. If you're thinking about using caged GABA to
study function at specific GABAergic synapses, you might find his report pretty interesting...
June 2010:
Activity-dependent relocation of the axon initial segment
 Matt just published the fruits of his post-doc work with Juan Burrone as
a Nature paper. Using dissociated cultures of hippocampal
neurons, they showed that long-term increases in electrical activity can result
in the relocation of an entire neuronal subcompartment – the axon initial
segment, or AIS – up to 17 µm away from the cell body. What's more, this relocation is associated
with alterations in neuronal excitability, making it a mechanism by which cells
fine-tune themselves in response to ongoing changes in their activity.
The paper appeared alongside
another Nature letter from Hiroshi
Kuba and colleagues at Kyoto University,
who also found evidence for considerable plasticity at the AIS, this
time in
vivo. In chick auditory system neurons,
extended sensory deprivation was associated with an increase in AIS
length, and
an accompanying increase in neuronal excitability. Like Matt &
Juan's paper, this shows
neurons altering their AIS to adapt to long-term changes in their
electrical
input. What will be really interesting
in future will be to understand why these alterations are sometimes
solely in
AIS position, and sometimes only in AIS length...
There's
also a review on AIS development and plasticity written by Matt
& Juan published online in Current
Opinion in Neurobiology this
month. Just a shame we didn't know about
the Kuba et al. paper while we were writing it!
You can download the podcast from here. [MP3 file 13.7MB - right click link to download.]
May
2010:
Starting out and retreating
 This
month saw the beginnings of the Grubb lab: Matt, Annisa, Mark, and a
couple of very
empty benches. We're spending plenty of
Wellcome Trust money to fill that space as quickly as possible, but
believe it
or not we've already managed to do some experiments...
Mid-May,
and the lab was involved in an MRC Centre retreat in Achill Island in the Irish Republic. We had two
busy days of really good, open scientific discussion, and three full
days of
absolutely miserable weather.
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Site designed and maintained by Annisa Chand (annisa.chand [at] kcl.ac.uk). Copyright A. Chand 2010 - 2013. |
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