Dana Foundation Blog

Creating a Neuroscience Learning Community

This post, by Ali Sayed-Ahmad of Wayne State University, is part of an occasional series written by undergraduate neuroscience students. If you are an undergraduate interested in writing about neuroscience for the Dana blog, or a professor who might have interested students, please contact Andrew Kahn at akahn@dana.org for more information.

This school year was an exciting one for neuroscience at Wayne State University. Through our neuroscience learning community, we have promoted neuroscience by meeting our objectives of awareness, education, and outreach. A learning community (LC) gives students the close-knit, interactive experience of a small college within a major research university. Small groups of students work closely together to learn about a similar interest. Underclassmen are mentored by upperclassmen, along with a faculty advisor that facilitates discussions and activities. Being in an LC is also a great place to socialize and make friends with students who may be in your classes. Overall, it makes the college experience a lot less overwhelming for freshmen at a big university and provides upperclassmen the opportunity to hone their leadership skills.

Neuroscience: Inspiration I can Share

This post, by Ali Sayed-Ahmad of Wayne State University, is part of an occasional series written by undergraduate neuroscience students. If you are an undergraduate interested in writing about neuroscience for the Dana blog, or a professor who might have interested students, please contact Andrew Kahn at akahn@dana.org for more information.

Though we do not think about it much, the three-pound spongy mass residing in our skull is a miraculous product of nature. From this highly condensed and intertwined structure, myriad complex behaviors such as language processing, consciousness, and metacognition (knowing about knowing) arise, setting us apart from other species in our vast biosphere. Over the course of my studies as an undergraduate student studying neuroscience, I have realized we do not yet know the complete physiological mechanisms modulating these complex behaviors. Until we can answer fundamental questions like how we learn or what exactly dreams are, neuroscience remains a great frontier in science.

Like many other scientists around the world, I have caught “neuroscience fever.” What makes neuroscience so attractive is the fact it is a very interdisciplinary field of research that combines biology, psychology, physics, medicine, computer science, and many other branches of knowledge.  My interest in neuroscience began in high school, when my biology teacher taught us about the neuron. This type of cell, with its beautifully branching neurites, changed my perception of the bland spherical cells I saw in introductory biology textbooks. What impressed me the most, however, was learning how the neurons generate a voltage output to communicate with other neurons.

I further pursued my interest in neuroscience by joining Dr. Karen Myhr’s lab at Wayne State University, where I was working to develop an in vivo method that examines the localization and translation of mRNA in cultured cortical neurons. This project was exciting because translation and localization of mRNA in the dendrites of neurons is vital to the function and plasticity of the brain. These mRNAs allow rapid synthesis of proteins in response to neural stimulation, which increases the long-term potentiation of connections between neurons. Significant cognitive impairments, such as those in Fragile X syndrome, can arise from disruption in the translation of dendritic mRNA. After multiple trials, I was able to identify an effective method to track these mRNAs, called peptide-mediated endocytosis. This involved using cell penetrating proteins and a fluorescent dye to enter the living cell.

Through the course of my experiments, I realized that research is challenging because there are many variables to manipulate and protocols to perfect. But it’s also immensely rewarding to realize I am making a difference in the world by adding knowledge that could potentially help people.

An important aspect of my time in Dr. Myhr’s lab was participating in neuroscience outreach activities. One of the most enjoyable volunteering experiences I participated in the past two years was Brain Awareness Week. Going to the Detroit Science Center to show young kids and their parents cow eye dissections and teach them about the retina is important to get kids excited about neuroscience. As time progresses, I hope to get more people inspired by neuroscience the same way I am.

--Ali Sayed-Ahmad, Wayne State University, Biological Sciences, Class of 2012

http://bio.wayne.edu/profhtml/myhr/myhr.html

http://lc.wayne.edu/students/lclist.php#neuro

This year, Brain Awareness Week is March 14–20. In March, check out the BAW International Calendar of Events to see what's up in your area. Researchers, students, and teachers can join the fun now as partners, planning to host or assist at myriad events.

Your brain on change

This post, by Mike Giangrasso of Tulane University, is part of an occasional series written by undergraduate neuroscience students. If you are an undergraduate interested in writing about neuroscience for the Dana blog, or a professor who might have interested students, please contact Andrew Kahn at akahn@dana.org for more information.

In the past two months, my younger sister has started college in the Appalachian mountains, my cousin (and close friend) has inaugurated his well-earned career as an English teacher at a small private school in upstate New York, and my grandmother, who has lived with my family for eight years, has moved south, to Maryland.

It has been a busy time for my family, and we have all seen a lot of change. “Too much change,” my cousin remarked in conversation, and I absently agreed with him. Of course I agreed with him—it is almost a cliché to say that to be human is to fear change. But the same could be said for any other species with a nervous system or something close to it; to be feline is to fear change just as to be cnidarian is to fear change. This distaste for change encourages organisms to seek stability, which often involves responding immediately and appropriately to environmental fluctuation.

This external fluctuation is the reason that many organisms have been endowed with innervation. At its most basic and generalized best, the nervous system of any organism exists to allow that organism to respond to changes in its environment on a time scale much smaller than that which is permitted by evolution. A sea anemone whose nerve net allows it to retract when stimulated is far better equipped to respond to a wide variety of threats than one relying solely on its evolved ability to sting, for example.

Why, then, are some organisms equipped with tremendously complex networks of highly specialized neurons, while others maintain comparatively simple nervous systems? The answer lies in the environment: a greater degree of environmental complexity tends to correlate with a greater degree of neural complexity—and this not only applies to species in general, but also to individuals. Rats maintained in a stimulating environment, for example, have been shown to develop brains with detectable structural differences, such as enlarged cortical neurons and a proliferation of dendrites, in response to their demanding environment. Conversely, when exposed to an impoverished environment, rats’ brains become observably smaller and less complex.

As humans, we are immersed in a socially augmented environment whose changes are much more rapid and considerably less transparent than those faced by rats - while a rat’s relationships with other rats may impact its wellbeing in small ways, social graces are not high on its priority list. But social approval or disapproval can open (or close) a human being’s doors to sex, comfort, safety, and shelter. And this critical social world can change dramatically at the speed of conversation, a variable which, it should be noted, is rapidly increasing with the advent of technologies such as text messaging and the Internet; a nerve net will not suffice!

The implications of our hyper-social environment are far-reaching. In The Mating Mind, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miiller argues that our brains’ incredible capacity for such cultural phenomena as art and music developed as a result of sexual selection because of the reproductive advantages early artists experienced over their social rivals.

So the next time you find it difficult to keep up with life’s rapid pace, take heart: Change is responsible for all of the richness of life that a human brain affords. 

--Mike Giangrasso, Tulane University, Class of 2013

http://www.neuro.tulane.edu/

Immunization for Alzheimer's disease?

This post, by Andrew Byrne at the University of Albany, is the first of an occasional series written by undergraduate neuroscience students. If you are an undergraduate interested in writing about neuroscience for the Dana blog, or a professor who might have interested students, please contact Andrew Kahn at akahn@dana.org for more information.

Imagine if Alzheimer’s disease joined the ranks of Polio and the Measles. To prevent it, all you would have to do is stop by the doctor’s office and get a shot every year or so. As farfetched as it may seem, the idea for an Alzheimer’s immunization has been around for the better half of a decade and while we are far from a magic bullet, researchers have uncovered several promising leads.

The idea for an immunization is largely based around the amyloid cascade hypothesis, attributing the neuropathology of Alzheimer’s to aggregates or plaques of the protein beta-amyloid. Originally the toxicity of beta-amyloid was thought to reside in its tendency to form plaques in areas of the cortex like the hippocampus and the amygdala, big players in memory formation and retrieval. More recent studies show that other types of beta-amyloid may be a cause of the toxicity as well.

Researchers determined that targeting plaques with antibodies directed against beta-amyloid might increase clearance from the nervous system while preventing amyloid aggregation, thereby improving cognition in Alzheimer’s patients.

Results thus far have been mixed. Elan and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals recently published a long-term follow up of patients immunized with synthetic beta-amyloid 1-42, AN1792, in conjunction with QS-21, an immunologic adjuvant. The original study was discontinued in Phase IIa clinical trials when some subjects developed encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain. The follow-up, conducted five years after the initial immunization, found that some subjects (referred to in the paper as “antibody responders”) continued to produce antibodies directed against AN1792. In addition, these subjects out-performed placebo groups in several measures of cognitive functioning.

Admittedly the study is not without its flaws. Of the 300 patients originally treated with the vaccine, only 20 percent were deemed antibody responders. The remaining participants either did not produce antibodies or did not produce enough to be of therapeutic value. While one-in-five may not seem like a pharmaceutical triumph, I see it as a big step in the right direction.

So how close are we to an Alzheimer’s vaccine? With at least ten amyloid-targeted vaccines in clinical trials and countless more preclinical animal studies, I’d say a lot closer than we were 10 years ago. New ways of immunizing are being explored, targeting the genome as well as other proteins. For now we will have to wait.

--Andrew Byrne, University of Albany, May 2011

http://www.albany.edu/neuron/center/

www.albany.edu/mcnaylab