Apologies for the long time since the previous post, but we have been busy! The best and most important development since then is news of our first laboratory publication: Mark’s first author paper on calcineurin signalling and AIS plasticity features no less than six current and past Grubb Lab members, and is currently in press at the Journal of Neuroscience. Congratulations everyone!
We also just found out that the lab was successful in bidding for a Research Grant from the Royal Society. This will add UV-based calcium imaging to the already impressive array of things our confocal can do for us, so we’re itching to start playing with the new equipment as soon as possible.
Not too much travelling at the moment while we gear up for bigger things in 2013, but we had a very local zebrafish imaging meeting in December where Adna got to present her initial data, and Matt went to two different Wellcome fundee meetings in the space of two weeks recently where it was great to interact with scientists across all sorts of biological disciplines.
Personnel-wise, we have a new MRes roton Tom Ryan in the lab, who’s getting involved with olfactory bulb development and plasticity in vivo and producing some lovely 3D cell images.
Away from the bench, we had a Watkinswine-fuelled celebratory dinner to mark our 36-month anniversary as a lab (why not?), a Spiced-up Christmas party season, and we even scored free tickets to go and look down on the department from the top of the Shard!
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)…
