Neuroscientists Talk Shop

On February 23, 2023 we spoke with Zoé McElligott about alcohol, the difficulties encountered trying to understand its effects on the brain and the origins of alcohol use disorder...

On February 16, 2023 we got a chance to chat with Rakez Kayed on the tau protein, the key constituent in neurofibrillary tangles that are seen in the brain in Alzheimer's disease, and present in many other kinds of neurodegeneration.  He answered our questions about what tau protein is, how it is changed in neurodegenerative diseases, and what might be done about it...

On December 1, 2022, we got the opportunity to talk to Shannon Macauley about the multiplicity of causes and effects in the etiology of Alzheimers Disease, and her experimental work on the contributions of sleep patterns, age, blood and brain glucose and lactate, and insulin...

On November 17, 2022 we talked with Susan Sangha about brain mechanisms of learned fear and safety, and the neural circuits in the amygdala, cerebral cortex and hippocampus that evaluate threat and mediate our responses to it.

Guest:

Susan Sangha, Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Stark Neuroscience Research Institute...

On November 3rd, 2022 we talked with Harold Zakon about the cells that enable weakly electric fish to generate electric fields around themselves and to use them as a sensory and social communication system.  Harold described the remarkable independent evolution of this capability twice, in the African and in the South American electric fish, and the host of coordinated genetic changes that were required to create this entirely new sensory modality...

On October 27, 2022 we got the opportunity to talk to Michael Scofield about methods used to study the structure and synaptic function of astrocytes, and some of the advances that have resulted from their use, especially for glutamatergic synapses in the cerebral cortex.

Guest: 

Michael Scofield, Departments  of Neuroscience and Anesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at Medical University of South Carolina...

On Thursday, October 20, we held our 13th annual Neuroscience Symposium.  The topic was organoid models of cortical development.  Brain organoids are 3-dimensional tissues grown from pluripotent stem cells. For studying cortical development, the stem cells are cultured under conditions that promote differentiation into cerebral cortex neurons...

On October 13, 2022 we sat down to chat with Mel B. Feany about the molecular processes underlying the neuropathology of alpha-synuclein and Parkinson's disease. We focused on her findings implicating the actin cytoskeleton as an intermediary in mitochondrial dysfunction and other cellular mechanisms that contribute to pathology and cell death.

Guest: 

Mel B Feany, Department of Pathology, Division of Neuropathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School...

On Thursday, October 6, 2022 we got the opportunity to talk to Nicolas Tritsch about his studies of oscillatory fluctuations in dopamine and acetylcholine measured simultaneously in the striatum during behavior. We started from the technical side of this new experimental technology, but the conversation ranged into the implications of these oscillations for striatal function and learning, and for Parkinson's disease...

On Thursday, September 8, 2022 we were joined by Genaro Coria-Avila, to talk about sexually dimorphic nuclei in the brain, other forms of brain sexual dimorphism, and their relation to sexual behavior.

Guest:

Dr. Genaro Coria-Avila, Genaro is a research scientist at the Brain Research Institute at the Universidad Veracruzana  in Xalapa, Mexico...