papers – Grubb Lab

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?

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!

November 2014

By Annisa Chand News

Our main news this month is that Annisa’s paper has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Neuroscience! Entitled ‘A distinct sub-type of dopaminergic interneuron displays inverted structural plasticity at the axon initial segment’, it not only describes different, functionally distinct classes of dopaminergic cells in the olfactory bulb, but also characterises a novel form of plasticity in one of these classes. It was a lot of work from Annisa and Elisa, as well as a significant contribution from our project student Rob Chesters, and they can be rightly proud of what they’ve produced. The manuscript will be Open Access as soon as it’s out, and we’ll post the appropriate link here next time so you can read it for yourselves.

Adna and Matt thinking very hard about the AIS

Elisa presenting her poster at SfN 2014

Annisa’s AIS is this big

Annisa found out about the paper when she was still in Washington DC, where the lab attended this year’s Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. Adna, Annisa and Elisa all presented posters and all were very well received, despite us book-ending the meeting with Saturday and Wednesday afternoon timeslots (we’ll get luckier next time, because we’re overdue on that now…).

Overall the meeting was great, with a nice buzz around the meeting halls, some impressive plenaries, and a lot of really useful contacts made. Plus everyone apart from Matt made the most of being in the US afterwards: Elisa to go and visit her collaborators at Harvard, Adna to scope out potential post-docs in New York, and Annisa went to see the Space Shuttle Discovery.

While we were in DC our newest lab member Darren held the fort admirably, and even generated some quality data! Darren’s on a joint PhD studentship between our department and the SGDP at the Institute of Psychiatry, and in his rotation with us has already demonstrated a knack for patching that means we hope we can persuade him to stick around…

Finally, we’re continuing to spread our influence as widely as possible. Matt recently interviewed to become an inaugural member of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, and spent a fantastic day advising the Theatre-Rites production company on its plans for building a human brain to stick in a puppet. And Elisa was interviewed and accepted as a Brilliant Club mentor, which means she’ll be teaching neuroscience to widen access to university-level education for outstanding pupils from non-selective state schools.

Tired poster presenters in the Wednesday afternoon “graveyard slot”

This is Gao, new honorary member of the Grubb Lab.

Post-poster reward of chili cheese fries and half smokes at Ben’s Chili Bowl

September 2014

By Annisa Chand News

It’s been a full-on, productive summer here. We’ve written and submitted not one, but two important papers from the lab! Annisa’s first-author story came back from The Journal of Neuroscience with promising reviews, so we’re revising that for re-submission very soon. Mark and Adna’s joint first-author story has just been submitted to Neuron, and we’re all keeping everything crossed for a similar reception there too… Add Matt’s Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship application to the mix and it’s been a big few months for GrubbLab writing!

Away from the word processor, Adna went to Transylvania and built a 2-photon microscope, then came back and has been going crazy for AIS live-imaging. Annisa presented her recent work at FENS in Milan, and has just disappeared to hunt for post-docs and quality beer in Berlin. And Elisa, as well as getting our slice rig up and functional, won herself an iPad for being an outstanding young behavioural neuroscientist, and got selected by King’s as a post-doc representative on a ‘Life Beyond the PhD’ workshop in the Queen’s backyard (Windsor).

We were all in one place long enough, though, to hold the annual charred food fest that is the (in)famous GrubbLab BBQ, and if you don’t believe us, here’s the evidence!

Annual Grubb Lab BBQ

April 2013

By Annisa Chand News

Annisa, Adna and Mark at BNA 2013, Barbican, London.

Mark’s paper is now out in J Neurosci and thanks to Wellcome’s Open Access policy it’s available for all to read here and here – enjoy!

Braving the hottest, most cramped and most inaccessible poster board layout known to science, Adna, Annisa and Mark all presented at the recent BNA Festival of Neuroscience just up the road at the Barbican. Some good feedback & discussion, and some interesting sessions at the conference too, so we’re hoping the BNA sticks to London in the future.

More team member changes, as usual – Tom finished his rotation project with us, and we now have an MSc student for the summer, Shivali Kohli, who’s looking at optogenetic activation of calcineurin-dependent transcription factors. And we’re hoping that Elisa Galliano will join us for a post-doc soon. Matt went over to her current lab in Rotterdam to give a talk in March, and to work on possible projects and funding for her to study olfactory bulb plasticity here. The applications are underway, so fingers crossed!

Lastly, in non-science lab news, Matt got married on April 13^th! A fantastic day despite the British weather, and life as an honest man is agreeing with him very well so far.

June 2010

By Annisa Chand News

cover_nature Matt 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!