Neuroscience Graduate Program

The Neuroscience Training Program at the CU School of Medicine provides multidisciplinary training covering the breadth of neurobiology, from neuronal gene regulation to the development, structure, and function of the nervous system.

Students receive training in cellular and molecular neurobiology, neural development, neuropharmacology, and biochemistry, as well as hands-on training in a variety of state-of-the-art laboratory techniques.

Read the rest here:
Neuroscience Graduate Program | School of Medicine ...

(Adds Neuroscience details)

LONDON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Shire said it was exploring strategic options for its hyperactive drugs business, including a possible independent public listing, as the London-listed pharmaceutical maker upgraded its full-year earnings forecast on Thursday.

Shire, which reported 7 percent growth in second-quarter product sales, said it expected to complete a strategic review of its Neuroscience franchise by the end of the year.

"As part of the board's ongoing commitment to optimise Shire's portfolio and strategic focus, Shire is assessing strategic options for our Neuroscience franchise to derive even greater value from this franchise," it said.

The company upgraded the midpoint of its full-year forecast by 10 cents to $15 after stronger-than-expected costs savings from its acquisition of haemophilia specialist Baxalta last year.

It reported second-quarter revenue of $3.75 billion and non GAAP earnings per ADS of $3.73, up 11 percent and beating a market forecast of $3.60.

Shire shares were trading up 3.4 percent at 4,341 pence at 1126 GMT.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Jason Neely)

See original here:
Shire may spin off Neuroscience franchise, upgrades guidance - Times of India

Japan is like no other country in the world, fusing the ancient and the modern seamlessly. As soon as I landed in Tokyo, I noted the presence of a girl in a kimono against the scintillating neon billboards and endless flow of salarymen. Dressed in a sakura print and wooden sandals, she exhibited a timeless beauty.

The Japanese capital delivers an incredible array of experiences, from festivals at shrines to crane games at arcades. Opportunities for scientific growth are also among the offerings in Japan. This summer, I had the chanceto attend a weeklong lecture course in the greater Tokyo area called, Exploring and Emulating the Brain, organized and held by the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. In recapping my trip, I hope to make apparent the benefits of exploring your field in a new place.

My First Day

As I sat down for breakfast on the first day of the program, I was overcome with anxiety. Surrounded by strangers on the opposite side of the world, I moved to the rightmost corner of the lobby. I sipped on miso soup as I eavesdropped on awkward conversations about the brain and jetlag. Choosing not to socialize, I walked to the campus alone.

Too shy to initiate conversation, I sat in the lecture hall reading The New Yorker. Someone soon approached me holding out his ID badge. I put away my iPad and remembered that my primary goal for this course was to engage with fellow program participants. As aspiring young scientists, we build our professional networks and create job opportunities through communication and collaboration. Although it may not feel like it in the moment, an uncomfortable situation can help you grow as a person. The challenge is to get past that initial discomfort to learn something new. I was able to experience that this summer through the RIKEN BSI Summer Program.

Course Content

Alongside my peers, I was able to learn from the noted neuroscientists in attendance. Each lecture was an hour and a half, which enabled professors to share their findings in great detail. Andrew Zalesky of the University of Melbourne, Australia gave the first of fifteen lectures. He presented on neural connectomics, which is the production of comprehensive structural maps. Many researchers question the usefulness of connectomes. Its like a road map that tells you where cars can drive, but does not tell you when or where cars are actually driving, says Oliver Hobert of Columbia University. However, Zalesky elegantly argued that connectomics revealed topological properties shared across scales and species. One such property is hub nodes, which are brain regions that integrate information to enable efficient signaling.

As neuroscience details the anatomy and activity of the brain, artificial intelligence seeks to develop a non-biological path to intelligence. In a discussion panel on neuroscience and artificial intelligence, we heard from prominent researchers such as Yoshua Bengio, Shun-ichi Amari, and Andrew Zalesky. My takeaway was that artificial intelligence is not the equal of natural intelligence in most important tasks for human cognition such as vision and natural language processing. However, this is not to say that artificial intelligence wont ultimately achieve principles of natural intelligence.

Through this course, I learned how experimental and theoretical research could benefit each other. Speakers such as Terrence Sejnowski created a model based on experimental data to generate hypotheses. His computational background enabled him to bring new approaches to problems that had been accepted in sleep research. With data-driven predictions, perhaps experimental neuroscience can accelerate more rapidly and we can come closer to understanding what makes us human.

Conclusion

My greatest takeaway from this course was the incredible people I met. I had the opportunityto interact withpeople from all over the world aspiring to become scientists. Through conversations with graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, I was also able to learn about life as a scientist in Japan.

After each day of lectures, we set out to explore Tokyo in the evenings and participated in the optional Tokyo tour at the conclusion of the program. From feeling at home in the hipster district of Shimokitazawa to being overwhelmed by the pachinko parlors of Akihabara, it was incredibly rewarding to experience Tokyo in all its flavors. The RIKEN Brain Science Institute Summer Program surpassed my expectations and I highly recommend it.I encourage fellow early career researchers to immerse themselves in a new culture while pursuing science.

References

Salaryman. (2017, July 13). Retrieved July 31, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman

RIKEN Brain Science Institute Summer Programs Poster,http://www.brain.riken.jp/en/asset/img/summer/Poster2017.pdf

Daniel Mediati, Science is the Name but Collaboration is the Game, April 14, 2017. http://blogs.plos.org/thestudentblog/2017/04/14/science-is-the-name-but-collaboration-is-the-game/.

RIKEN Brain Science Institute,http://www.brain.riken.jp/en/.

Dr. Andrew Zalesky, People: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from http://www.ee.unimelb.edu.au/people/staff.php?person_ID=24599

PLOS One Connectomicshttp://journals.plos.org/plosone/browse/connectomics

Oliver Hobert Lab Website, Columbia University,http://hobertlab.org/.

YoshuaBengio. Retrieved July 31, 2017, from http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/yoshua_en/

Shun-ichi Amari, RIKEN Brain Science Institute,http://www.brain.riken.jp/labs/mns/amari/home-E.html.

The Sejnowski Lab,http://cnl.salk.edu/.

Photographs provided by the author.

Here is the original post:
Neuroscience in the Land of the Rising Sun - PLoS Blogs (blog)

Four tubes contain the ingredients that produce bioluminescence: Coelenterazine appears buoyant, swirling as it interacts with luciferase. The three tubes on the right also contain different colored fluorescent proteins attached to the luciferase which, as a result, emit cyan, green or yellow light. Credit: Nathan Shaner

With up to $9.2 million in funding over five years from the National Science Foundation, Brown University will lead a national center dedicated to developing and disseminating new tools based on giving nervous system cells the ability to make and respond to light. Neuroscientists could use the tools to uniquely manipulate and observe the circuitry of the brain in a variety of model organisms.

The new "NeuroNex Technology Hub" is a collaboration of labs at Brown, Central Michigan University and the Scintillon Institute. The team's charge is to invent, improve upon and combine several unique bioengineering technologies to create new research capabilities. They will then make their advances rapidly, easily and freely available to the global scientific community.

"Through NeuroNex, we want to enable all scientists to take advantage of the best tools," said principal investigator Christopher Moore, a professor of neuroscience at Brown and associate director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science (BIBS). "There is a real problem in science of certain inequities in access. The idea is to systemically address that."

The center's other leaders are Diane Lipscombe, a Brown professor of neuroscience and BIBS director, Ute Hochgeschwender, a professor at CMU, and Scintillon researcher Nathan Shaner. Justine Allen, a graduate of Brown's doctoral program in neuroscience, will serve as the center's administrative director.

In addition to creating the new tools for the scientific community, the team intends to turn its research, which combines elements of biology, chemistry, physics and engineering, into a curriculum to engage and educate high school students.

Enlightened brains

The research has its roots in bioluminescence, the natural ability of cells to make light, as fireflies and many aquatic animals do. Moore, Lipscombe, Hochgeschwender and Shaner have already been working together to engineer bioluminescence into a variety of cells, including neurons, in a project supported in its early stages by the W. M. Keck Foundation. Their work includes making light production contingent on an influx of calcium, a typical means that neurons employ to trigger each other into action. They've also created a brighter form of bioluminescence with proteins they call LumiCaMPsins. In the new project, they will continue to work to create even brighter calcium-modulated bioluminescence in neurons.

The team combines this engineered bioluminescence with optogenetics, a decade-old technology in which distinct types of neurons can be genetically altered to turn on and off in response to light. Currently, optogenetics requires scientists to inject light into the brain of an animal via fiber optics at times and places they hope are appropriate for their work. But when bioluminescence and optogenetics are combined (the scientists call this "BL-OG"), cells can illuminate and regulate themselves when an event, such as a particular behavior, spawns an uptick in calcium. Cells programmed in this way, Moore said, can automatically respond to experimental conditions without the scientists having to manually stimulate them.

As a hypothetical example of how meaningful that could be, Moore posits a clinical application of the technology (should it become applicable in humans in the future). Imagine that a person with epilepsy is about to have a seizure, he says. As neurons with BL-OG begin to become overly activated by surging calcium levels, they could emit light that would optogenetically override that hyperactivity, automatically dampening out the seizure before it can get started.

Beyond programming cells to regulate their own activity, the team also hopes to develop ways to make cells stimulate each other with light. Such "inter-luminescence" would allow scientists to program and observe calcium-modulated dynamics in whole circuits, Moore said.

Moreover, the group also plans to create new imaging tools. Using a variety of fluorescent molecules, including some that Shaner helped to pioneer, scientists today can make cells glow in response to experimental events, Moore said, but that requires shining a stimulating light on them that can damage tissue and adds a source of noise as that incoming light scatters. Bioluminescence allows cells to glow on cue without that external stimulation, reducing the possibility of damage and reducing a source of scatter. Implanted imaging devices could also be lighter and use less power if they don't have to produce stimulating light.

Moore said one of the reasons the collaborators are excited to share what they are finding is that there is much more room for innovation with the technology than they can fill on their own.

"In our own experience as a cloud of labs working on this stuff, the list of things we want to create to make the world better is getting bigger and bigger," Moore said. "We want to enable the whole field to let them all go after it."

Enlightening minds

As they develop new tools and techniques, the team will employ several means to disseminate them, Moore said. They will produce a website with downloadable experimental protocols, genetic sequences and other documentation and will send "emissaries" to teach other research groups. They will annual hold workshops for visiting scientists to come together, generate and discuss ideas, form new collaborations and learn how to use the new technologies.

"Bring all your students and all your postdocs, and inspire them to take a few of these research questions," Allen said. "Take those home and let this grow."

Moore noted that the collaborators have a strong ethic of such openness. He serves on the board of OpenEphys, an open-source initiative to promote sharing of electrophysiology tools started by two former graduate students in his lab. Lipscombe, Hochgeschwender and Shaner have also openly shared tools and technologies with the research community before, he said.

In addition to teaching other scientists, Moore said, the collaboration will also teach students at several different levels. They plan to hold a weeklong "intensive practicum" course for undergraduate students every spring at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., to which they encourage applications from students underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. They will also create and teach courses in local Providence high schools that already work with the Brown Brain Bee. And finally, Moore said they hope to create an online version of the curriculum for other schools nationwide.

Explore further: Revolutionizing the revolutionary technology of optogenetics

View original post here:
Brown to lead 'NeuroNex' center for creating bioluminescent neuroscience tools - Medical Xpress