Maisam won 2nd place in the oral presentation competition. Congrats!

Josselyn volunteered at the 6th annual Charles Morris STEM Social for underrepresented students as a representative of the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP). Josselyn talked about student opportunities and the LSAMP/STEMAlliance, and the services and support the program offers to underrepresented students.

Finally a new video on our youtube channel. Calcium imaging of pacemaker neuropil activity in the stomatogastric ganglion. 

Our students presented at this year's University research symposium. With four posters from graduate students and one undergraduate poster we were among the most productive labs. The photos below show undergraduate student Maisam Yousef presenting her poster on how backpropagating action potentials influence sensory encoding, and PhD student Margaret DeMaegd and her poster on temperature responses in the nervous system.

Great article on ScienceTrend about our @PLOSBiology paper on how multisensory information is encoded in the nervous system: http://buff.ly/2HGN4ga

Our lab is interested in temperature effects on neurons and their function. Most long distance communication in the nervous system is carried our by long neuronal processes called axons. These thin "wires" have distinct properties that remain poorly understood. We are testing how a temperature increase (for example during a fever) affects neuronal information as it travels along axons. As a first step, we need to describe the different properties of the axons, and one of the them is their thickness and fine structure.

Video 1 below shows a 3D rendering of the axons of the three main motor neurons in the pyloric central pattern generator in the stomatogastric ganglion of the crab, Cancer borealis. More than 100 individual iImages were taken with a Nikon confocal microscope and reassembled for the 3D reconstruction. Differences in axon size and structure are clearly visible. Contrary to common believe, most axons are not round, but have rather distinct anatomical shapes.

Video 2 shows the cell bodies of the same three neurons. Fluorescent dye was injected into the cell bodies to stain the axons. Video 2 also shows the fine structure of the neuropil area in the stomatogastric ganglion, where the three neurons interact synaptically.

Video 3 slowly scrolls through the different layers, and beautifully shows how 3-dimensional these neurons are.

Video 1:

Our newest paper is out in PLoS Biology:

Follmann, R., Goldsmith, C.J. & Stein, W.* (2018). Multimodal sensory information is represented by a combinatorial code in a sensorimotor system. PLoS Biology 16(10), e2004527, epub ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2004527