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!
