News – Grubb Lab

June 2017

By Matt Grubb News

Time flies, and plenty happens! Here’s what we’ve all been up to this year so far…

Carlos, Megan and Matt making science more open in Lisbon

Our paper linking AIS plasticity to myosin-II activity is out now in EJN, and was even picked up by the journal as a Featured Paper! You can access the full text here, and get all the raw data here. And while we’re being open, it’s worth mentioning that the construct we developed and described for live-labelling the AIS is now (finally) freely available at Addgene. With Open Science being a fundamental principle for us these days, it was also great for Matt to spend two days this month contributing to an EC RISE workshop in Lisbon on “Researcher careers and the European Funding system: How to make Open Science a reality?” Hopefully some of the recommendations we came up with there will encourage more people to be open with their research.

This month also saw the start of our EU-funded Horizon2020 ERC Consolidator Grant, which means new lab members getting to work on the project, and a new 2-photon microscope for in vivo experiments – exciting stuff, and more details next time…

Lots of meeting-related action for the Grubb lab so far in 2017. Elisa, Darren and Chris all presented posters at the BNA Festival of

Darren and his BNA poster

Chris and her BNA poster

And Elisa and her BNA poster! But where were the punters??

Neuroscience in Birmingham, where the sessions were – to be honest – underwhelming, but the balti was excellent! But that wasn’t the end of those posters, thankfully – Elisa went on to use hers to scoop the poster prize at the Young Embryologists meeting in London, while Chris & Darren both got far more useful and plentiful interactions with theirs at the KCL PhD symposia held at Guy’s Campus and Denmark Hill. In the meantime, Marcela stopped by the Festival of Genomics, went to Norwich for a Single Cell Symposium, and continued to oscillate productively between London and Exeter. And Matt’s been out and about too, getting together with fellow Scholars at the April FKNE meeting, talking at the Spring Hippocampal Conference in Sicily, and presenting to a diverse public audience at our local KCL Neuroscience Symposium.

Strictly scientific speed-dating at Chicheley!

FKNE Scholars’ strictly scientific speed-dating!

In terms of personnel, we’ve had the usual crazy turnover: project students-wise, Asha & Grace finished their BSc projects and have now come back for a few summer weeks to contribute to new directions. Monika got some great preliminary data in her MRes rotation, before handing over the MRes baton to Rachel, who’s spent the last few months trying to get OB cells to inhibit themselves. We’ve also taken on Krishna, who’s working on birthdating of OB dopaminergic cells for his extended MSc research project. More permanently, we have a new post-doc in the lab! Menghon has come to us after finishing his PhD with James Fawcett in Cambridge, and will be working on our BBSRC grant focusing on connectivity in OB dopaminergic cells. And we also have a new Technician! Eleonora, with a fantastic background in neuronal plasticity, has recently become part of our ERC-funded team to get that project off to a flying start.

Finally, massive congratulations to Elisa! Not content with scoring a poster prize, and another prestigious FENS SfN Travel Award, she’s trumped everything by securing a Temporary Lecturer position at the University of Cambridge – amazing! Her new role, due to start in May 2018, should run for at least 10 years, and will give her the chance to establish her own independent research group in a fantastic new environment. Well done Elisa!

February 2017

By Matt Grubb News

We heard the fantastic news late last year that Matt was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant! This is an amazing opportunity for us to push forward our work, and will allow us to do a whole heap of experiments that just wouldn’t be possible with other types of funding. We’ll use it to focus on adult-generated neurons in the olfactory bulb, and how their elevated potential for plasticity might contribute to information processing in sensory circuits. In practical terms that means lots of slice physiology, as always, but we’ll also now have the ability to monitor and control neuronal activity in vivo too, and that’s incredibly exciting. It’s a 5-year award starting later this year, so let’s hope the UK Government sticks to its promise to underwrite all European funding obtained while we’re still part of the EU… If you’d like to know more, you can find more detail on the award from the KCL IoPPN newsletter, and also in the ERC’s own press release.

We’ve also taken some of our own advice recently, and have published a preprint of our latest paper on BioArxiv. This one is a nice short paper revealing a necessary role for the motor protein myosin II in activity-dependent structural plasticity at the AIS. It’s currently under review at a ‘standard’ peer-reviewed journal, but you can see the submitted manuscript here, and we’ll update that as and when it’s finally published. We’ve also deposited all of the primary data at Figshare, but those will only become publicly available once the final version of the paper has been accepted. We’ll try and do this for all of our work from now on – here’s hoping we reap the benefits of Open Science!

Some great recent news from our alumni: Adna got herself an EU IntraEuropean Fellowship to start her post-doc with Claire Wyart at the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris. And Annisa just landed a new post-doc working with Frank Heppner at the Charite in Berlin.

Finally, we welcome 3 new project students to the lab this term! Monika’s doing her 2^nd MRes rotation project with us, looking at plasticity in adult-born dopaminergic neurons. And Asha and Grace have both started BSc projects, Asha on morphological plasticity in external tufted cells, and Grace on plastic epigenetic changes in the olfactory bulb. Welcome guys!

November 2016

By Matt Grubb News

We’re celebrating the publication of Adna’s paper in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience this month! As part of a special collection of papers on ‘Neurobiology of the Axon in Health and Disease’, this paper outlines our quantitative evaluation of different methods for live-labelling the axon initial segment. After ruling out several antibody-based and genetically-encoded approaches for various reasons of unsuitability, Adna finally found that one particular probe is extremely well suited for live studies of AIS plasticity. The paper’s completely Open Access, so if you want to find out which probe it is, you can read the full text here!

FKNE on the beach…

After a nerve-wracking Brussels interview for an ERC Consolidator Grant last month, Matt is now experiencing an equally nerve-wracking wait for the outcome. But this was made more bearable by attending the autumn meeting of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence in Benidorm (no, really), which featured a heap of great science, along with the once-in-a-lifetime chance to sing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ in public with Richard Morris…

…and up the alley!

Other lab members have been travelling too, Marcela to Heidelberg for the ‘From Functional Genomics to Systems Biology’ meeting, and Darren to San Diego to attend this year’s SfN meeting. And Elisa came back from Boston for a flying visit, too, which gave us the perfect excuse to revive our traditional ‘half-year’ curry – marvellous!

September 2016

By Matt Grubb News

Matt & Tim representing FKNE in Brussels!

As part of the FENS-Kavli Network’s commitment to bettering the future of early-career researchers, Matt joined Tim Vogels on a flying collaborative visit to the European Commission this month. We’ve been collecting data all summer on the status of grant funding for early-career researchers across Europe (if you’re a young PI and still haven’t completed our survey, you can find it here), and we went to discuss our preliminary findings with a diverse team from Commissioner Carlos Moedas’s Research, Science & Innovation cabinet. It was a great, super-interactive meeting where we found a lot of common ground, and we forged some exciting plans for the future. Let’s hope this is a first step in influencing things for the better…

Back in the lab, we’ve welcomed Andres Crespo to our team! Andres has joined us as a Research Technician, supporting all of our work but focusing especially on our IRP-funded project on olfactory nerve regeneration. Our epigenetics team Darren & Marcela have both been making connections in the world of single-cell analysis – Darren at the Single Cell Genomics meeting at the Wellcome Genome Campus, and Marcela at the Brain Mosaic meeting in Leuven. And congratulations to Barbara, who successfully completed her MSc project with us this month.

July 2016

By Matt Grubb News

Adna drawing a crowd…

Recent months have seen Grubb lab representation all over the place. Matt and Elisa attended the annual FENS Kavli Scholars meeting at Chicheley Hall in April, where Elisa got to both present her latest stuff and come up with a bonkers grant proposal. At the recent FENS Forum in Copenhagen, Adna and Elisa were kept nice and busy at their excellent poster presentations. Matt chipped in too with a panel discussion on Open Science at the CHET committee ‘Code of Conduct and Ethics in Science’ event, as well as doing lots of FKNE-based business. Everyone got caught in the rain. And Matt just presented at the UKSN meeting in Cambridge, in an excellent olfactory neurophysiology session.

…and Elisa too!

Matt being Open

More FKNE-based interactions resulted in Matt co-authoring another Editorial article in EJN, this time on mobility for junior researchers – you can find that here. You can also read about our exciting new epigenetics project on the Leverhulme Trust site and on the Centre webpage.

We’ve started expanding the lab, welcoming Marcela Lipovsek to the team as a senior post-doc working on that same Leverhulme-funded collaborative neuro-epigenetics project. She’s ordered some new pipettes already, and clearly means business… We have more appointments to come – look out for a new post-doc position to be advertised very soon!

Existing lab members have been super busy. Special congratulations to Adna, who successfully passed her PhD viva exam, has had her thesis corrections approved, and is now Dr Dumitrescu! She’s also currently teaching on the CAJAL Advanced Neuroscience Training Course in Neuronal Cell Biology: Cytoskeleton and Trafficking in Bordeaux. Elisa has been bouncing between London & Boston, not only taking full part in the April FKNE meeting and presenting at FENS, but also securing a funded position on the prestigious Imaging Structure & Function in the Nervous System course at Cold Spring Harbor. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for her project, she’ll now be in Boston until Christmas. Both Chris and Darren presented well-received posters at the Guy’s Campus Postgraduate Research Symposium, and competed in the KCL heats of the Three-minute thesis competition, with Chris getting all the way to the local final! And Candida did exceptionally well in her BSc project – so well in fact that she’s currently working with us in a funded summer placement.

Notice all those foreign names in this and other News pieces? Needless to say the entire Grubb lab was devastated by the recent Brexit vote. Just in case we needed any further proof that leaving the EU will make it more difficult for us to do our jobs, here’s our contribution to the #WeAreInternational movement – note that Matt’s the only British person in the team, and now wishes he could be from somewhere else. We can’t say this any more strongly – we’re still keen to recruit the right people, wherever they’re from, and we’ll fight our hardest to make sure that doesn’t change.

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.

February 2015

By Annisa Chand News

The main news this month is the publication of our second paper from the lab: Annisa’s work on AIS plasticity in olfactory bulb dopaminergic neurons came out recently in The Journal of Neuroscience! It’s Open Access, so you can access the online version of the manuscript here or the PDF here. We’re really proud of this paper – it’s the culmination of a lot of effort to establish these cells as a model for different forms of activity-dependent plasticity, and it’s the first demonstration that the AIS can be plastic in inhibitory interneurons. In fact, we show that AIS plasticity in these cells goes in the opposite direction to the changes we and others have seen before in excitatory neurons. This may have some interesting and important implications for information processing in olfactory bulb circuits, which is exactly what we plan to investigate next…

More good news: Matt found out late last year that he was selected as an inaugural member of the FENS-Kavli European Network of Excellence! This is a new pan-European network of young neuroscientists with a really exciting remit – basically, we get to decide for ourselves how we can best promote and serve European neuroscience, plus we have some great opportunities for collaborations and interactions amongst ourselves. More details on all of that once we’ve made some policy decisions at our first meeting in April, but in the meantime you can read more about the Network and check out all the ‘Scholars’ here, and you can see the KCL version of the story here too.

We also have a couple of new Masters project students for the new term. Andrew’s made a cracking start to his MRes rotation by learning to patch hippocampal cells, and is now busily gathering data. And Marine joins us from the University of ENS in Lyon for an MSc project looking at experience-dependent plasticity in olfactory bulb dopaminergic cells in vivo.

Finally, we received the excellent news that our collaboration with the children’s theatre group Theatre-Rites was successful in obtaining a Small Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust! This means that we’ll be consulting further with the team as they continue their R&D sessions to develop a neuroscience-based performance called ‘Pinocchio – a Case Study’. If that’s anywhere near as enjoyable as the time we’ve already spent with them it’ll be an absolute blast!