U-Pass

[spruceh0rn]

Finally, Northwestern's grad school has joined the U-Pass program of the CTA, meaning I now have free unlimited public transit in Chicagoland! Well, technically the grad school adds another $60 quarterly fee for all full-time students, but since I don't actually pay that myself, it's free for me. Yay

Comments

[spruceh0rn]

I work with Josh Singer at Northwestern's med school. He is a synaptic physiologist who started out in pulmonary mechanics but now looks at the rod pathway IN the retina. His particular interest is AII (A2) amacrine cells, and he focuses primarily on their input from rod bipolar cells and electrical (gap junction) coupling with other AIIs. I personally find so much in neuroscience interesting, but the most interesting things to me were always sleep and circadian rhythms. My project in the lab is to look at circadian influences (or their equivalent) on the retina. (I don't think the retinal processes are truly circadian, as they seem to be controlled directly by light levels, whereas most circadian processes don't respond direcly or immediately to light, but are controlled more internally

[spruceh0rn]

And here, finally, is where the mice come in. The reason no one has ever recorded from these cells is that they are very rare (you only get an average of one in a 200-µm slice) and almost impossible to identify by straight morphology (their morphology is fairly distinct, but very hard to pick out when there's only one cell per slice). Somewhere along the line, Josh got to talking with Jim Surmeier (the leading Parkinson researcher at Northwestern) and learned about his lab's main strain of transgenic mice, which have their D2 dopamine autoreceptors labeled with GFP (so they can find dopaminergic cells). Josh decided to check and see if the DACs were also GFP-tagged in these mice, and sure enough they were. What's more, there are only a couple other cell types that are labeled with GFP in the retina, but the DACs are by far the largest, and are identifiable by their dendritic processes. So all we have to do is use fluorescence in our microscope to focus on the cell. When we switch back to our normal visualization it is very clear