Public engagement – Grubb Lab

March 2016

By Matt Grubb News

Plenty of good news recently! We found out early this year that we were awarded a 2-year Research Grant from the International Foundation for Research in Paraplegia. We’ll use this to investigate regeneration of the olfactory nerve and the way that plasticity in the brain adapts to and facilitates that regeneration. It’s a really exciting project that takes the lab in an important new direction, so we can’t wait to get started and will be openly recruiting for a Technician post very soon. Head to our departmental news piece here if you’d like to know a bit more…

We were also recently awarded a Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust, a fantastic independent UK charity that supports academic research in all its forms and who we’re extremely proud to be funded by. This 3-year project will be undertaken in collaboration with Prof Jon Mill’s Complex Disease Epigenomics Group at the University of Exeter, and will investigate the links between activity-dependent functional plasticity and epigenetic regulation, all at the single-cell level! We’ll start recruiting for a post-doc to work on this as soon as possible.

And last but by no means least, we got a Responsive Mode grant from the BBSRC as well! Coming the day after the Leverhulme news, that will almost certainly be the only time we ever get 2 grants in 2 days… This one’s also a 3-year project – for which we’ll be recruiting a post-doc soon – and will investigate differences in connectivity between resident and adult-born olfactory bulb neurons.

******* If you’re interested in working with us on any of those projects, please don’t hesitate to contact Matt for an informal discussion *******

Apart from being fortunate in the grant market, Matt also had an Editorial piece on Open Science published recently in the European Journal of Neuroscience – one of a series focusing on the careers of early-stage neuroscientists coming out of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence. You can read it here, and if you’re a young PI you can go and complete the associated survey here – it’ll only take 20min, honest! And he spent a really enjoyable day visiting Romain Brette’s lab at the Institut de la Vision in Paris, which should hopefully lead to some inventive and productive re-use of our e-phys data.

Erm, that pipe’s upside down…

The big news from the lab is that Adna handed in her thesis at the end of March – well done Adna! Thankfully she’s going to stick around for a little while to polish a few things off and sort out her post-doctoral future. Talking of which, Rosie passed her viva very successfully in December and has just landed herself a post-doc in Berlin, in the process doubling membership of the Grubb Lab alumni branch in that city! And Elisa’s been representing us abroad too, making the most of her Fellowship to spend some time learning lots of new skills with Venki Murthy’s lab at Harvard. She’s also found the time to publish a new Frontiers Editorial on all things cerebellar which you can read here. Candida, our latest project student, has made great progress and generated lots of interesting data, and Chris bravely volunteered to present her work at our most recent internal seminar where she did a fantastic job given she only started 6 months ago!

Darren, Chris and Adna all participated in the department’s latest ‘Glow in the Dark Science’ extravanganza, blowing the minds of local schoolkids with fluorescent stuff. And finally, it feels like a long time ago, but the pictorial evidence demonstrates that we again did ourselves proud at the DevNeuro xmas party – Grubb Lab doing art means dogs playing poker, with some very special guests (Mark, you know you need to come back every year now, right?)!

November 2015

By Matt Grubb News

The big news this month is the publication of our latest research paper, co-first-authored by Mark and Adna, and available now at Cell Reports! This story took a lot of work and we’re very proud of the final product – having been utterly baffled by our data at first, we think we made sense of it all in the end, and that’s extremely satisfying. You can read a lay-friendly summary of the paper, and check out our quote-tastic opinions of our own work, on the departmental website, and the story has already been picked up by others too! The bottom line is this: we found that our favourite part of the neuron, the AIS, can change way quicker than anyone had seen before, and that, all else being equal, this change is tightly linked to alterations in neurons’ electrical outputs. And if you’re intrigued by that ‘all else being equal’, good for you – now read the paper!

In the lab we’ve had a significant student influx, because after successfully securing Distinction grades in the departmental MRes programme, both Chris and Darren decided to come and do their PhDs with us! And while Marwa finished up her MSc project, obtaining Distinction grades for her report and poster presentation, we’ve welcomed our newest MSc project student Barbara into the lab – she’s currently busy learning everything Adna knows (which is pretty much everything anyone knows) about the zebrafish AIS.

Adna’s kind of town!

Over a busy early autumn period, Matt submitted a couple of grants and gave talks at the Brains & Roses olfaction meeting in London as well as to the Umeå Neuroscience Society in Sweden’s Deep North. Adna headed off to the US to represent the lab at this year’s SfN Meeting in Chicago, and stayed over in a concerted and targeted job hunt.

We’ve been very engaging recently, too! One of Elisa’s star Brilliant Club students had his essay published, and we hosted a work experience student Regina on the excellent In2Science scheme whose account of her time in the department was also prize-winning. Finally, Duncan from Fifth Sense paid us a visit to talk about olfaction and smell disorders, and we’re now hatching plans to do something fun with those guys next year.

July 2015

By Matt Grubb News

Our latest paper came out recently, and this one’s important – hopefully the first of many in a fruitful collaboration with Jon Mill & Chloe Wong in the Complex Disease Epigenomics Group. Jon and Chloe’s labs study epigenetic changes to the physical structure of DNA that affect how specific genes are activated. We combined their expertise in this field with our interest in neuronal plasticity to start looking at how alterations in neuronal activity can produce epigenetic modifications. Using cultured neurons, our paper shows that increasing electrical activity can produce significant changes in DNA methylation across the genome. We then go on to show that a large number of these changes are dependent upon signalling through Ca_V1 calcium channels and the calcium-dependent phosphatase calcineurin, two inter-related pathways known to mediate multiple forms of neuronal plasticity. This makes us think that epigenetic plasticity forms an important component of the neuronal repertoire of responses to altered activity, acting alongside other forms of plasticity controlled by the same intracellular signalling molecules. If you’d like to know more, the full text is Open Access at the new journal Neuroepigenetics here – enjoy!

Adna shaping the future of Brixton

Elsewhere, the lab can’t seem to stop winning prizes! Adna, not content with organising a spectacular and phenomenally successful ‘Glow in the science @ KCL’ exhibit at the recent Brixton TechnoPop event, was joint winner of the department’s 3^rd-year PhD student talk prize at our recent KCL Postgraduate Research Symposium. Not to be outdone, Elisa went to an event at the Italian embassy and came away with the ‘Italy made me’ prize for Life Sciences. Think we’re going to have to get a trophy cabinet for all these…

Meanwhile, Chris successfully completed her 3^rd MRes rotation, Marwa is busy collecting a

Post-pub playtime!

mountain of imaging data, and Matt had a great time meeting a bunch of fellow olfaction enthusiasts at this year’s UK Semiochemistry Network meeting in Cambridge. And last but by no means least, the annual Grubb Lab BBQ extravaganza was held early this year, with Matt pleading toddler-induced exhaustion and cheating by taking everyone up the pub! At least there was the opportunity for playtime afterwards – maybe it shouldn’t be a great surprise that drunk scientists plus kids’ toys equals competitive mayhem?

June 2015

By Matt Grubb News

Lots of comings and goings recently. Matt’s Career Development Fellowship came to an end in May, and while he’s moved onto a Lectureship here at King’s, this meant we sadly had to say goodbye to Annisa, who’s been with us right from the start. Annisa was absolutely instrumental in establishing our lab and the research we’re doing now, so we’re enormously grateful for the time she spent here, and wish her all the best with her new adventures in Berlin.

We also had two Master’s students finish their projects with us: Andrew, who patched more cells than he thought he would, and Marine, who got some really interesting data with her sensory manipulations. Good luck with the rest of your courses, guys!

In the same period we’ve had two new Master’s students join us: Chris, who’s looking for functional effects of sensory manipulation in acute olfactory bulb slices, and Marwa, who’s busy working her way through a library of potential markers for dopaminergic subpopulations. And we’ve (sort of) gained a PhD student too – Rosie, who did a rotation project with us way back in 2012, has officially stayed at King’s while the Keck lab relocated to UCL. And while we’re talking about ex-students, it’s great to known that Dutch Dennis finally found himself a PhD he can be happy about at Utrecht University.

As well as gaining and losing lab members with alarming regularity, Matt’s been busy presenting our work at the MRC Unit at Harwell, and on a whistle-stop tour of the neuroscience institutes of Basel – thanks especially to Douglas Bakkum at the BSSE for the original invite, as well as for coffee in the awesome ‘Science Lounge’. He also spent a hugely enjoyable two days at Chicheley Hall as the new FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence tried to figure out what to do with themselves. And the R&D with Theatre-Rites has continued to be great fun – they visited the lab and took lots of pictures, and we watched them improvise and assured them that life at the bench is rarely so dramatic.

Adna’s also been taking our science to the masses, representing the department at the recent Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience PhD showcase, giving a great Internal Seminar, and winning 3^rd prize in the King’s ‘3-minute thesis’ competition! And last but by no means least, Elisa, when not tutoring our army of project students, has been inspiring our nation’s youth through Brilliant Club and found time to present our work for some much needed departmental feedback.