Author: Jessica Teeling
ARUK flash presentations on 28 March
The Annual Alzheimer’s UK conference is well underway and thanks to the South Coast ARUK network, many early career researchers were able to attend and even present their work.
All ECRs who received support from the ARUK network will be expected to give a flash presentation and talk us through their highlights of the ARUK annual meeting.
Did you present your own data and got good feedback? Did you meet your favourite dementia scientist at your poster and discussed the latest discoveries in dementia research? Did you attend the research symposium or policy conference and learned about new techniques or models that are worth discussion in more detail?
We look forward to find out about your experience and your highlights of the conference and share it will all SoNG members who were unable to attend.
See you on Wednesday 27th March in B85.2207/2207 from 16.00.
Mighty Quiz
SoNG seminar 21st February
SoNG seminar 14th February
Save the date – 1st March- for the ARUK mightly quiz
Seminar 7th February
Wednesday 7th February
Today, the two speakers in our Song Neuroscience seminar series were PhD student Diego Ojeda Perdrosa, talking about the effect of maternal high fat diet on the offsprings neuroinflammation and neurogenesis, followed by Dr Julie Obst, who talked about her work on IL-34 in models of neurodegeneration. Another inspiring afternoon of soton neuroscience.
Diego Ojeda Pedrosa
Julie Obst
SoNG seminar 24th January
SoNG seminar 17th January
Wednesday 17th January
Today Mariana Vargas Cabellero, research lecturer in biological science, treated us to a overview of her work into synapses in Alzheimer’s disease.
Mariana uses experimental models of Alzheimer’s disease to establish if early changes to synapses contribute to memory loss. Using clever ways of inducing and suppressing amyloid at different time points during diseases development she can find out if diseased neurons can be rescued from degeneration. Increased expression of amyloid reduces neuronal function as measured by a reduction in short term and long term memory. By using electrophysiology it was shown that these changes to neurons start very early (few weeks) after exposure to amyloid which worsens over time. Mariana explains that this is due to a reduction in synaptic plasticity and the hippocampus is trying to compensate as a reaction to the increased level of amyloid.
Remarkably, suppressing the expression of amyloid can rescue the changes in neuronal plasticity. How can we explain this?
Is it synaptic proteins, signalling pathways, or tau? All these are questions to be answered in Mariana’s ongoing work.
SoNG seminar 6th december
