November 2011
The main event this month was the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington DC. Matt co-chaired a minisymposium on 'Short-
and long-term plasticity at the axon initial segment' which brought together
six young(ish!) researchers to present their recent AIS work, and which was a
huge amount of fun – lots of fresh data, some great talks, some lively
questions, and a brilliant opportunity to spend some time talking science with
others in the field. Thanks to everyone
who contributed and to everyone who came along, especially those who spared the
time to chat to us afterwards. The minisymposium
also spawned a little cross-continental state-of-the-art review in the Journal
of Neuroscience, which you should be able to read here.
Not forgetting the rest of the lab, Annisa
and Mark were in DC, too. When we
weren't eating half-smokes
or getting shot at, we were busy presenting two well-received
posters which you can see here ( Annisa, Mark).
Thanks again to all those who took the time to come and talk about
olfactory bulb and hippocampal AIS plasticity – we left the meeting with some
extremely useful contacts and a lot of good feedback.
And while we're in conference season, we
just heard that Sabrina – our summer student from UC Irvine – presented her
work at the ABRCMS meeting in St. Louis and came away with a poster prize. Jolly well
done Sabrina! 
September 2011
The last couple of months have been a
period of great collective achievement in the Grubb lab. Here's the summer student roll-call: Saj and
Abdul both successfully polished off their MSc projects, and both managed to
get Merits overall, which we're dead proud of.
Sabrina sadly had to return to life in sunny Southern California, taking
with her a new-found love for booze, British comedy and golf ball rolling
(don't ask), but leaving behind new ways for us to label cell types in our
hippocampal cultures. Tom used his
charity money very wisely, learning how to patch and getting some nice data on
structural AIS plasticity. He's now busy
becoming a real doctor, but is still popping in now and again as part of his
'Student Selected Component'.
As for the permanent team members, Mark
finally persuaded enough people to read his PhD Upgrade report so that he can
transfer to full doctorate pursuit status, Annisa presented her data at a
one-day Imperial College symposium on 'How to Succeed in Science' (think we all
should've gone, really), and Matt managed to submit an MRC Research Grant
that'll hopefully expand us in all the right ways next year. Fingers crossed!
July 2011
Our latest student team member joined us this month: Sabrina's visiting on a 2-month project
from UC Irvine, working on AIS plasticity in different classes of hippocampal
cells. She's also been busy finding
neurons wherever she looks. In fact, there's been a spate of
unlikely-looking biology either discovered or created by the lab recently, and
it's all on show here.
Matt didn't show any of these images, but he did present
a poster at the excellent Adobe Acrobat PDF - 17.45 MB], where some new contacts and interesting
presentations made for 4 days full of quality science. He was also invited to give a seminar at the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair,
which was fantastic for building links with other UK AIS researchers. We're hoping for some fruitful collaborations
out of those interactions, so watch this space.
June 2011
First, an apology. Having moaned about the lack of interest in
the SET for Britain event in March, Matt now has to eat his words. Our workplace MP Simon Hughes, a
rather busy man, found time this month to have a chat with Matt at the House of
Commons about our work, the MRC Centre, and student fees, and has provisionally
arranged a lab visit in August! Great to
know someone's listening.
Earlier this month the Wellcome Trust, who
fund our research but also put a lot of money into public science
communication, invited Matt and a group of other scientists to take part in DocFest, a
documentary film festival/conference up in Sheffield. A really different and fascinating couple of
days – not only some great films, but also an opportunity to interact with
filmmakers and commissioners about how to tell factual stories well, and how to
fund your project. Matt now has a
new-found respect for anyone brave/mad enough to launch an independent
documentary film-making career!
And finally, not content with getting a first in his
finals, Tom rounded off an excellent week by securing funding from Dravet Syndrome UK
for a two-month summer studentship. Now
he just needs to learn how to patch...
April 2011
Plenty going on this month! First, Matt was invited to talk at the 2nd
annual Manchester Neuroscience Symposium,
which was a great day full of wide-ranging high-quality neuroscience and a
chance to meet some really interesting people.
Thanks again to the organising committee for the kind invitation.
Then it was the biennial British
Neuroscience Association meeting in Harrogate.
Lots of good stuff, including some fantastic plenary speakers, some
fascinating specialised symposia, and of course Mark's poster! He got plenty of interest and feedback, and
you can take a look at it yourself here [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 7.84 MB]. E-mail him if you've got any questions (and
yes, we do know about the spelling mistake in the title...)
Tom finished up his undergraduate project
with us this month, producing a polished thesis and a brief talk on
how, unfortunately, we failed to find anything interesting about AIS synapses
in dissociated hippocampal cultures.
Still, well worth knowing, and he's not been too disheartened – Tom'll
be back in the summer to attack something completely different (and reinstate
his Matlab obsession).
Finally, April saw the arrival of not one
but two new MSc project students in the lab!
Adbul's doing a joint project split between us and Martin Meyer's group and will be looking to follow AISs in live zebrafish, while Saj is doing some
fundamental AIS biology to see if we can really pin down the location of action
potential initiation. Great to have them
both on board!
March 2011
This month Matt went to the Houses of Parliament to take part in the annual SET for Britain event, designed to get researchers talking to MPs and policy makers about their science. You can look at his poster here [PDF - 9.37 MB]. If you do, you'll be showing more interest than UK politicians: not only was the Science Minister completely absent from the event, but neither Matt's workplace nor home MP responded to their invitations, and the only MP who did stop by did so because she mistakenly believed he was a constituent (Nicola Blackwood, thank you anyway)! A sharp lesson in how much our elected representatives really care about basic science, then, but a nice day out all the same...
February 2011
We've had a good few productive months
since the last post, with everyone getting their heads down, battling the frost
& snow, and coming into the lab to produce some really exciting preliminary
data on all projects. We can't reveal
any details just yet, but watch this space!
We've also got a new lab member: in between
training to become a 'proper' doctor, Tom Watkins has joined us for his
intercalated BSc lab project, looking at synaptic inputs to the AIS in
hippocampal cultures. He's already
re-worked our standard Matlab scripts and acquired a big stack of confocal
pictures, so there should be some of his images up in the Gallery soon...
Finally, we've just heard that Matt's going
to be co-chairing a minisymposium at this year's Society for Neuroscience
Annual Meeting in Washington DC (November 12-16). It's titled 'Short- and long-term plasticity
at the axon initial segment', and will involve talks from six young(ish)
researchers interested in various aspects of AIS plasticity. More details to come, but save the dates!
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