External Event - 9th Apr 2019
16:00 - 17:30
City Gate Hotel, Iron Bridge, Lower North Street, Exeter, EX4 3RB
Exeter Neuroscience Seminar Series.
Hosts: Prof Jonathan Mill & Dr Craig Beall
Research talks between 4:00pm - 5:00pm. Drinks can be purchased at the bar during and after the talks.
Programme:
4:00pm - 4:20pm. Dr Darren Schreiber. Neural nonpartisans.
4:20pm - 4:40pm. Soraya Meftah. Using in vivo whole-cell recordings to understand neurophysiological dysfunction in early dementia.
4:40pm - 5:00pm. Speaker TBC.
Biographies/Abstracts:
Dr Darren Schreiber - While affective conflict between partisans is driving much of modern politics, it is also driving increasing numbers to eschew partisan labels. A dominant theory is that these self-proclaimed independents are merely covert partisans. In the largest functional brain imaging study of neuropolitics to date, we find differences between partisans and nonpartisans in the posterior medial cortices, a portion of the brain’s Default Mode Network implicated in both our sense of self as well social cognition. These results suggest that rather than being mere covert partisans, nonpartisans process the world in a way that is distinct from their partisan counterparts.
Soraya Meftah completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Surrey, spending a placement year in the CNRS in Lyon exploring the relationship between REM sleep deprivation and cataplexy in a mouse model of narcolepsy using EEG. Following this, she worked for three years as a molecular pathologist at Eli Lilly & Company in research and development with a focus on neuropathology in neurodegenerative diseases in relation to drug discovery. She is now a PhD student supervised by Dr Jon Brown, Dr Jon Witton and Dr Michael Ashby based at the University of Exeter and the University of Bristol studying synaptic and neuronal dysfunction in a mouse model of dementia (tauopathy).
Synaptic degeneration is one of the best correlates to cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s Disease, yet we have little understanding of the functional changes occurring before neurodegeneration and its’ relationship to tau pathology (one of the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s Disease). Jackson, Witton et al, 2017 revealed a synaptic phenotype in the barrel cortex in a mouse model of dementia at a time point just prior to neurodegeneration. This presentation will build from this, looking to describe some of the work done towards a better understanding of the mechanistic relationship between tau pathology and dysfunction prior to neurodegeneration using in vivo two-photon targeted patch clamp electrophysiology and in vitro patch clamp electrophysiology.
