August 2012
Olympic fever is finally dying down in London and things are
getting back to something resembling normality in the lab after a busy old
summer.
Rosie finished off her MRes
project with us and she’s gone on to a PhD in the Keck lab. There she’ll continue her interest in all
things plastic, and hopefully add some extra data to the interesting results
she already produced with us. And as
part of the reciprocal GrubbLab-KeckLab exchange programme we’ve now got Adna
back after her spiny summer sabattical.
She’s starting a PhD in collaboration with Martin Meyer’s lab, looking
at AISs in zebrafish – a really exciting new direction for us.
We’ve also had two week-long work experience
students learning about neuroscience in London; what’s more, both Eleanor and
Grace managed to produce useful data in their short time here. Not the most accurate reflection of normal
scientific progress, but at least we haven’t put them off for good…
Finally, the traditional Grubb Lab summer
party went non-traditionally barbeque-free – we ate loads of chilli and delicious guacamole on Matt’s
temporary riverside balcony instead. Oh,
and believe it or not we’re still waiting on Mark’s sausages.
April 2012
Transition time in the lab right now. Adna, Rob and Tom all did a grand job of
polishing off their respective projects this month, having all produced some
really useful data. Thanks guys! But we're not quite down to a skeleton crew
because
Rosie just joined us on an MRes rotation on
synaptic scaling. She's got mini
recordings already, so things are looking good...
Of the more permanent lab members, Matt
went to Goettingen recently to visit Andreas Neef's lab, giving a talk, getting
his hands dirty in the lab and talking a lot of extremely interesting
theoretically-biased action potential biology.
Hopefully there might just be some fruitful collaborations there in the
future.
Back in London, Annisa's been
working hard at taking her in vitro findings in vivo, while Mark's still
grappling with signalling pathways. The
biggest news, though, is the sausage-making kit we got Mark for his birthday
(pictures to follow soon!) - we're expecting gourmet butties very very soon...
It's taken us a while to warm up this year,
but the lab's now properly back in business with data flooding in all over the
place. This is not least because of two
new arrivals: Adna's patching like a professional already, and Rob's getting
thoroughly into his AIS analysis (see
Students page for more details). And because of Matt's shameful absence from
the otherwise stellar Grubb lab showing at the departmental Christmas
FancyDressFest, we treated ourselves to a team non-Christmas dinner this month
– you can ask Tom whose curry was nicest because he finished all of them off...
