On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast:

We’re back! If only for a moment. In this week’s dumpling powered episode Liam and Kathryn discuss working in groups, the Tim Hunt scandal, open science and closed off data.

 

This will be our last episode for a few weeks, so jump into our past episodes at www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the on Your Mind neuroscience podcast: 

It's a double whammy! We’re talking about two papers looking at using bone marrow transplants and microglia to treat Rett syndrome in mice. After a 2012 paper showed some very promising results some hospitals started using this approach for human trails, but a 2015 paper from a group of four labs have tried and failed to replicate the original findings. 

Before we can get to that Liam tries to rectify his love preparing talks with his hatred preparing posters, then lightens the mood with some talk of studying music. Then Kathryn discusses terrible advice for female scientists.

 

For links to everything we talked about today, full show notes, past episodes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:

We've got a lot peer review on our minds this week. Liam brings the story of fabricated data about canvasing for gay marriage, and Kats excited about ORCIDs integration of crediting peer review. 

Then in this weeks paper we talk about the different roles of D1 and D2 neurons in cocaine response. 

For links to everything we talked about full shownotes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca

 

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:

Kathryn talks shares some advice for young scientists, and explains why we should embrace the flawed nature of science and Liam tries to untangle the unsolved problems of neuroscience. 

Then in this week’s paper, mice and rats given early androgens or with blocked methylation have masculinized brains

 

For links to everything we talked about, past episodes, full show notes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca

 

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast.

We're joined by social worker Sophia Rinaldis to talk about the #addmaleauthorgate, why a teratoma is not an evil twin, and how to be more inclusive of other cultures in research. Sophia's interests are in the social determinants of mental health, and she's brought in a report from the Canadian Mental Health commotion of the efficacy of the At Home/Chez Soi project, a Housing first approach to improving the mental health of hopeless people. 

For links to everything we talked about, full shownotes, past episodes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca

 

 

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast, 

We're joined by neuroscience power couple Ian Blum and Robin Keeley for a discussion on the difficulties of being in a relationship where both people want academic positions, or the two body problem, and ethical issues surrounding a recent paper genetically modifying human embryonic cells. 

This week’s paper uses a modification of traditional drosophila learning models to compare the neural circuit used for visual and olfactory memories, and we spend as much time talking about the ups and downs of studying behaviour as we do on the actual circuits. 

 

For links to everything we talked about, full show notes and more, head to www.onyourmind.ca

 

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast:   Kat's away, and Liam is reunited with Adel Farah. Long time listeners will remember that a year ago Adel left academia for medschool, and Liam has recently decided that he will be leaving academia for.... something. We have a long chat about our motivations for leaving and what we have found, or hope to find, in the next phases of our careers.    This week Liam is bummed that he doesn't live in the States, because it means he can't sign up for Genes for Good, an academic project that periodically collects health data from you, then sends you a DNA kit and correlates genetic findings with health outcomes. If you ask them they'll also send you the results of your gene profiling, but you'll have to go elsewhere for interpretation.    Adel has been thinking about something similar, but for tumors. A recent commentary in Nature proposed a banking of genetic samples from all tumors, alongside long term patient outcome information. This could help up get a lot more insight into the genetics or cancers that go into remission, or have a high chance of resurfacing.    Finally, our paper this week (OA) deals with the interaction of pain signaling and pain relief signaling by showing that activation of a "pain receptor" (NK1R) can increase the signaling of a pain relief signaling through the mu opioid receptor (MOR) by increasing its recycling to the cell membrane.    NKR signals through Protein Kinase C, and a PKC inhibitor removed the ability of NK1R to incrase MOR recycling while activating PKC independant of NK1R increased recycling. PKC seems to act by phosphorylating sites directly on MOR.    Finally they showed that giving mice Substance P, a terrifyingly named activator of NK1R, helped the opioid Fentanyl maintain it's effectiveness over two doses.    For links to everything we talked about today, full shownotes, and past episodes head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:

Liam and Kat talk about whether or not the current post-doc system is broken (it is) and how to fix it, then what lesson can universities learn from businesses?

This week’s paper is about the long term memory requiring astrocyte expression of klingon in the fly, and leads us to discussion of the importance of considering glia in your neuronal studies.

 

For links to what we talked about today, full show notes, past episodes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:

 

We're joined by Neuroethicist Dr Veljko Dubljevic  ! He tells us what it's like to be an ethicists, and lends his perspective to our conversations about peer review and the Human Brian Project. Then we get into a paper all about the public attitudes on issues of safety, pressure, fairness, and authenticity when it comes to cognitive enhancement. 

For links to everything we talked about today, full shownotes, and past episoeds head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:

Another week has gone by, and Kat and Liam are back to catch up over some science.  Liam’s got the proof of his review back from the journal and is reveling in seeing his (many) months of work in a formatted pdf.  Meanwhile, Kat’s been plugging away at processing her samples and is unreasonably enraged by a minor setback.  When she went to put her samples in an overnight incubation, she discovered that the oven was already in use, and she suddenly identified with an article that she read weeks ago, “How to P*ss off a Scientist”.  Liam’s had his own burst of frustration this week when he read the title of a press release that claimed that the differences between the autistic brain and the healthy brain have been identified “for the first time”.

Venting aside, he’s concerned about the implications of misleading titles and has read an article on “scienceyness” which argues that the effects are detrimental.  Scienceyness is a take on “truthiness” that describes the phenomenon of people re-sharing overhyped science headlines without knowing/evaluating whether they are true or not.  The author of this article suggests that the only outcome of scienceyness is long-term mistrust in science and the related damage to scientists; but Liam’s got a more optimistic view.

And speaking of reading articles with through an optimistic lens, Kat’s read an article in Scientific American, which has a cringe-worthy set-up that’s clearly meant to attract the attention of the public, but has an interesting thesis. The article covers a study that compared massive schizophrenia GWAS data to regions of the genome that have undergone accelerated change during human evolution.  The extensive overlap is used as evidence to suggest that there’s an evolutionary genetics explanation why schizophrenia is a uniquely human condition.  Then it’s onto this week’s article…

The Paper

Our article this week is published in Cell Stem Cell and uses induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease (SAD) to discover a unique interaction between SORL1 genotype and cellular phenotypes.  The authors chose to study SORL1 because it is a protein that is involved in the cleavage of APP and a gene that has been associated with SAD in previous studies.  Using their relatively large number of cell lines from patients and controls, they found no overall difference in SORL1 expression in fibroblasts, neural stem cells, nor in cultured neurons.  What’s more, the presence of a protective (P) or risk (R) haplotype at the 5’ end of the SORL1 gene had no impact on SORL1 expression.  Importantly, the authors realized that the addition of BDNF and cAMP to their cell medium could impact SORL1 expression so, instead of accepting their negative results as the end of the story, they did follow-up experiments with and without these molecules.

Adding cAMP to the media induced SORL1 expression in all the cell lines, while adding BDNF increased SORL1 expression only in cell lines with the P haplotype.  Their genotype-specific findings extend to amyloid beta protein levels, where increased SORL1 decreases the toxic protein only in cell lines with the P haplotype.  What’s most interesting about these findings is the lack of segregation between patient and control lines.  There are patient lines that do not carry the risk genotype, that must carry risk alleles at other loci, and there are lines that are homozygous for the risk allele, but lack the SAD diagnosis.  It is a beautiful example of the genetic complexity of polygenic disorders like SAD, and the potential of iPSCs to study them.

Young J., Daniel A. Williams, Grace Woodruff, Floyd Buen, Arra C. Revilla, Cheryl Herrera, Mason A. Israel, Shauna H. Yuan, Steven D. Edland & Lawrence S.B. Goldstein & (2015). Elucidating Molecular Phenotypes Caused by the SORL1 Alzheimer’s Disease Genetic Risk Factor Using Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, Cell Stem Cell,  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2015.02.004