Author: Annisa Chand

September 2011

  By

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

  By

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 IBRO meeting in Florence this month (PDF here), 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

  By

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

  By

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.  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

  By

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.  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

  By

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!

October 2010

  By

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

  By

DSC_0025aAfter 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

  By

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…

Download Mark’s project report here

June 2010

  By

cover_natureMatt 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…

Both papers are discussed and put into a wider context by a nice News & Views article by Grundemann and Hausser.  You can also listen to Matt and Juan discussing their paper in the Nature NeuroPod podcast, and read an interesting and pretty accessible account of the work on the Alzforum website.

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!