SFN 2019 for the Slug Lab

We’ve just wrapped up a great Society for Neuroscience conference for the slug lab. This year’s meeting (2019) was held right here in Chicago, which provided lots of opportunities for our talented crop of students.

We presented a poster examining the time course of forgetting and transcriptional changes at the undergraduate session and at the main meeting. Leading the poster presentation were Tania Rosiles and Melissa Nguyen. After warming up in the undergrad session they were bombarded with tough questions at the main meeting–and they handled themselves amazingly well, doing an awesome job presenting the research. Here they, basking in the knowledge that they had completely crushed it:

Tania Rosiles and Melissa Nguyen presenting that the 2019 Society for Neuroscience Meeting.

I guess they made a big splash, because later at the meeting, guess who asked me for a selfie?

Bob, Nobel-Prize Winner Eric Kandel, and Lisa Gabel. Kandel’s the one in the middle.

Ok – maybe it was me asking Kandel for a selfie, but either way it was cool to briefly meet the godfather of sea slug studies at the meeting.

Sluglab 2019 – It will be an unforgettable summer

It’s summer and the slug lab is rocking. We have 8 students working in the lab (!), and a number of really exciting projects.

Here’s the lab photo to start the summer.

From left to right: Kiara Rana, Dr. C-J, Dr.Bob, Tania Rosiles, George Garcia, Annette Garcia, Hannah Gordon, Lorena Juarez, Monica Duron, and Melissa Nguyen

We knew this spring that we had recruited a special group of students in to the lab. So far the work this summer has confirmed our hunch–we’ve already completed two rounds of behavioral testing, students are making progress learning qPCR, and yesterday we had a great start to learning electrophysiology. I’m sure we’ll have our ups and downs, but it seems like we’re poised for a fun and productive summer.

Projects we’ll be working on include: 1) investigating if savings memories are re-formed or re-covered, 2) investigating the role of the peptide transmitter FMRF-amide in forgetting, 3) exploring the role of methylation in memory maintenance, and 4) some exciting pilot testing with a paradigm for sensitization in fruit fly larva, in collaboration with Scott Kreher in biology.

Our work this summer continues to be supported by the NIH (our current R15 expired at the end of May, but looks like it will be renewed starting July 1). Huzzah.

In addition, Dominican has received a generous donation from Joe Moskal to start the Moskal scholars program. Joe is a professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern, a biotech entrepreneur, a Dominican trustee, and an all-around amazing guy. He generously helped Irina and me develop pilot data for our first grant and provided a sparkling letter of support… so it is no exaggeration to say he has already helped make the slug lab what it is today.

This year, Joe took the next step in his efforts to develop and broaden the biotech pipeline by funding the Moskal scholars program. Over the next five years this program will fund students interested in careers in the life and health sciences to spend a summer engaged in intensive research. The goal is for students to have the space, mentoring, and encouragement to develop their skills and passions in the science, and to launch them forward to great things.

Our first two Moskal scholars are Annette Garcia and Tania Rosiles. Tania will be spending her second summer in the slug lab–she’s already gained tremendous lab skills and helped co-author our recent paper on the long-term transcriptional response to sensitization ​(Patel et al., 2018)​. Annette is new to the lab, but was a star in Dr. C-J’s neurobiology class and has already been making big strides in the lab.

The inaugural Moskal Scholars: Annette Garcia and Tania Rosiles

Neither Irina nor I would be where we are today if we hadn’t been fortunate enough to have amazing summer experiences. For Irina it was a summer working at Loyola Medical School. For me, it was a summer at Carnegie Mellon. In both cases it was generous funding from sponsors that enabled us to forgo our usual summer jobs and spend 3 months in intense and life-altering contemplation and study. We are so excited and proud to pay that forward each summer with a new batch of slug lab recruits, and we’re extremely grateful to Joe Moskal for his generosity and support.

One of our annual summer traditions is having DU photographer Ryan Pagelow come to the lab for a group photo and some science B-roll. As always, he does an amazing job. Here’s this year’s album:

 
Google Photos Refresh Token invalid. Please authenticate from Photonic → Authentication.
Error encountered during authentication:
{
  "error": "invalid_grant",
  "error_description": "Bad Request"
}
See here for documentation.
  1. Patel, U., Perez, L., Farrell, S., Steck, D., Jacob, A., Rosiles, T., … Calin-Jageman, I. E. (2018). Transcriptional changes before and after forgetting of a long-term sensitization memory in Aplysia californica. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 474–485. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2018.09.007

SlugLab Alum Derek Stek heading to medical school with a full ride scholarship

Graduates of the sluglab have been moving on to amazing careers. So we were excited to get the news that lab alumni and neuroscience major Derek Stek has just been offered a full scholarship to attend medical school at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin. Woo hoo!

The slug lab in summer of 2018. Derek is the tall guy on the left-side of the table; this was just before he shipped out to UCLA.

Derek spent the summer of 2017 working in the lab, and also did summer research programs at the University of Colorado (2016) and UCLA (2018). In the sluglab, Derek learned how to do extract RNA (which does *not* start by vortexing the DNA-ase) and conduct qPCR. He helped track the expression of several transcripts regulated after learning, and was a co-author on the lab’s most recent paper (Patel et al., 2018).

Derek was also a star outside of the classroom, playing a big part on the DU varsity basketball team. This year, as he finishes at DU, Derek has been working with children with autism and learning behavioral therapy.

Congrats, Derek!

  1. Patel, U., Perez, L., Farrell, S., Steck, D., Jacob, A., Rosiles, T., … Calin-Jageman, I. E. (2018). Transcriptional changes before and after forgetting of a long-term sensitization memory in Aplysia californica. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 474–485. doi:10.1016/j.nlm.2018.09.007

When you forget

Quanta Magazine recently ran a feature article on the nature of forgetting.  The piece covers several new lines of research on forgetting, including the work we’ve been doing with Aplysia.  It’s a great piece, and it’s amazing to see strong public interest in our work.

To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget by Dalmeet Singh, Quanta Magazine

Of course, accolades like this would not be possible if it were not for our amazing students.  Here’s the lab enjoying our end-of-summer party.

 

DU Connections and a New Slug Home

The slug lab is kicking off summer research with a brand new aquarium and mixing station for housing Aplysia.  It’s a great upgrade and an even better story that involves some strong DU connections.

The slug lab has been running for 10 years now (gasp!) and our aquariums were showing signs of wear.  Like the wooden stand on one of the tanks starting to collapse.  Pretty strong sign.  (fortunately a student was in the room as the tank started to tip; she called for help, we drained the tank, and disaster was averted).  By fall of 2017 we were down to just 1 tank and worried about how we’d get back to 2 in time for our blitz of summer research.

DU Connection Number 1: In late fall 2017 we were thrilled to receive a McNichols grant from a Dominican Alumni.  This grant was specifically targeted at funding science education at Dominican. We had some meetings and identified several great projects that could be helped by this generous gift–work to improve our greenhouse, a new measurement instrument for the PChem lab, and… a new tank for the slug lab.  Hooray, and a big thanks to the McNichols family.

DU Connection Number 2: We knew we wanted to upgrade beyond a hobbyist tank.. but there were so many options and it was difficult to determine the best path forward.   Enter DU connection #2, Romney Cirillo and his company Something Fishy.  Romney was a business major at Dominican.  When he graduated he wasn’t entirely sure what to do.  But he remembered Al Rosenbloom’s advice to find something he was passionate about and to find a way to make it a life’s work.  Combining that advice with a great entrepreneurship class he had completed, Romney decided to start a business related to his life-long interest in raising exotic fish.  He recruited a great friend as a business partner.  Something Fishy was quickly born as a full-service aquarium design and maintenance company.   Since its founding, Something Fishy has thrived by providing great service and incredible craftsmanship.  Things were going well, so Romney started giving back to DU–installing a gorgeous salt-water tank in Parmer hall.  That’s how I met Romney and got to know Something Fishy.  So, naturally, when it came time for a new tank, Romney was the first person to call.  Thank goodness for these strong DU connections.

The amazing tank.  Romney and Mike visited the slug lab, walked us through options and designed a customized setup exactly suited for our needs:

  • a bigger tank with a better filter system
  • lower to the ground with a huge lid to make experimental access easier (our students say thank you!)
  • incredibly tough and corrosion resistant tank stand (no more collapses from wooden stands)
  • better insulation to make our chillers work less hard
  • and an incredible mixing station for making salt water, complete with a DI line and an auto-shutoff (no more leaks down into the classroom below).

We just finished our first round of experiments with animals housed in the new tank… wow!  Even on the day of shipment the tank water stayed at crystal clear.  Good water -> healthy animals -> a good platform for good science.

Not only is the tank *way* better than what we had, it looks amazing–the install is clean and sharp; it really looks space age.  Best of all, the cost was not astronomical.

So – thanks to two great DU alum we have a great new home for our animals.

Romney (right) showing me the features of the tank on install day.

Here are some photos, but they don’t really do the tank justice for how cool and clean it all looks.

First fillup. Water has just had salt added.

Smiles even on tank cleaning day! The new tank setup is soooo sharp. (Melissa, Ushma, and Leticia… there are slugs in the tank, but all are hiding in the back).

Slug Lab 2018 – Summer Edition

Summer is here, so the Slug Lab is running full speed.

We’re lucky to be joined once again by a really talented and dedicated team of students.  Here’s most of us at a pizza party to inaugurate a summer of research.  

From far left we have

  • Kayla Hall, joining us from Amherst for the summer
  • Ushma Patel, who has graduated but will stay in the lab for the start of the summer (and then on to study biomedical illustration at UIC)
  • Athira Jacob, lab alum now studying for her MCAT
  • Derek Steck, lab alum who this summer will be in the UCLA summer research program this summer
  • Steven Farrell, who has graduated but is also sticking with the lab for part of the summer while prepping for the MCAT
  • Dr C-J and myself (end of the table)
  • Tanya Rosiles, new lab member
  • Everett Krause, new lab member
  • Leticia Perez, lab alum sticking around for part of the summer before heading to UofI for veterinary medicine
  • Melissa Nguyen, new lab member and post-bac student

And not yet in the photo but planning on joining when she returns from Ireland: Shannon Wilcox

I hope I don’t jinx anything when I say that we’re off to a great start, with a very successful round of behavioral experiments and RNA isolations.  Looking forward to another great slug lab summer.

 

Slug Lab Triumph! First place in the cSFN undergraduate poster competition for Leticia Perez and Ushma Patel

So pleased and proud to announce that Leticia Perez and Ushma Patel have won first place in the Chicago Society for Neuroscience undergraduate poster competition.   Congrats Leticia and Ushma on a great presentation on the work you’ve been doing in the slug lab on the transcriptional correlates of forgetting and savings memory.

Leticia and Ushma are following up their spectacular win with exciting post-graduation plans.  Leticia is enrolling at the University of Illinois School of Vetrinary Medicine (and had her choice of programs!).  Ushma is enrolling at UIC’s prestigious medical illustration MA program (and also had her choice of programs!).  Congrats to both on all the hard work they put into collecting data, analyzing results, and presenting their exciting research.

Want to know more about the research Leticia and Ushma presented?  See their paper in Learning and Memory here: (Perez, Patel, Rivota, Calin-Jageman, & Calin-Jageman, 2017)

Not to brag, but this is the 3rd time a DU student has placed in this competition in the past 10 years (Kristine Bonnic had a 3rd place win and Tim Lazicki had a first place win).  That means DU neuroscience students have earned 1/3 of all the awards given out for undergraduate research by the Chicago Society for Neuroscience–an organization that includes Northwestern, Loyola, University of Chicago, DePaul, Midwestern, Roosevelt, North Central, and more…. relative to our student body we’re punching way above our weight!

Perez, L., Patel, U., Rivota, M., Calin-Jageman, I., & Calin-Jageman, R. (2017). Savings memory is accompanied by transcriptional changes that persist beyond the decay of recall. Learning & Memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.), 25(1), 45–48. [PubMed]

An unforgettable experience talking about forgetting

Wow! Our lab just returned from the 2017 Society for Neuroscience meeting.  It was the typical maelstrom of neuroscience–with more than 20,000 neuroscientists bustling about trying to share the latest and greatest about their research.

This turned out to be an especially great year for the Slug Lab.  Leticia Perez, who has been working in our lab for the past two summers, submitted an abstract to present the work she and others in the lab have been doing on forgetting.  We’ve been really excited about the results of this project.  It turns out the SFN organizers were excited, too–they selected Leticia’s abstract for a 10 minute talk during a mini-symposium on the mechanisms of learning and memory.

Leticia absolutely crushed it–she gave a concise, clear, and exciting presentation on what happens in the Aplysia nervous system as a long-term memory is forgotten.  She handled the questions wonderfully, and was soundly congratulated by many researchers in the learning and memory community.  Of the 20,000+ in attendance, I’m willing to be she was the only undergraduate to give a talk at this year’s meeting.  It was *such* an accomplishment.

In case that wasn’t enough, Leticia also brought along a poster presenting the research.  She gave the poster at the pre-meeting on molecular and cellular neuroscience and at the undergraduate poster session.  Yes, that means she gave 3 presentations last weekend!  Wow!  And, again, all went wonderfully.

Part of the reason Leticia was able to attend the meeting to earn all this acclaim is that she was awarded an Excel scholarship through Dominican University–this paid her registration, hotel, and airfare to make it affordable to attend the meeting.  She still had to work like crazy to collect the data, refine the presentation, and clear her class schedule to attend.  Lab alumnnus Marissa Rivota also attended–so her and Leticia also got to see the capital and the White house.

We’re so proud of Leticia, and of the many other students who have worked so hard in the lab for the past summers to make this forgetting project such a success.  There will be a paper on it coming out very soon in Learning and Memory.  It’s tremendous work to do good science–we’re so happy to have wonderful students who want to get involved and excel.

Below are photos of Leticia giving her talk, giving her poster, and celebrating with me, Irina, and Marissa.  Congrats, Leticia!

Maintaining Memories, Changing Transcription

Under the right circumstances, a memory can last a lifetime.  Yet at the molecular level the brain is constantly in flux: the typical protein has a half-life of only a few hours to days; for mRNA a half-life of 2 days is considered extraordinarily long.   If the important biological molecules in the brain are constantly undergoing decay and renewal, how can memories persist?

The Slug Lab has a bit of new light to shed on this issue today.  We’ve just published the next in our series of studies elucidating the transcriptional changes that accompany long-term memory for sensitization in Aplysia.  In a previous paper, we looked at transcription 1 hour after a memory was induced, a point at which the nervous system is first encoding the memory.  We found that there is rapid up-regulation of about 80 transcripts, many of which function as transcription factors (Herdegen, Holmes, Cyriac, Calin-Jageman, & Calin-Jageman, 2014).

For the latest paper (Conte et al., 2017), we examined changes 1 day after training, a point when the memory is now being maintained (and will last for another 5 days or so).  What we found is pretty amazing.  We found that the transcriptional response during maintenance is very complex, involving up-regulation of >700 transcripts and down-regulation of <400 transcripts.  Given that there are currently 21,000 gene models in the draft of the Aplysia genome, this means more than 5% of all genes are affected (probably more due to the likelihood of some false negatives and the fact that our microarray doesn’t cover the entire Aplysia genome).   That’s a lot of upheaval… what exactly is changing?  It was daunting to make sense of such a long list of transcripts, but we noticed some very clear patterns.  First, there is regulation influencing growth: an overall up-regulation of transcripts related to producing, packaging, and transporting proteins and a down-regulation of transcripts related to catabolism.  Second, we observed lots of changes which could be related to meta-plasticity.  Specifically, we observed down regulation in isoforms of PKA, in some serotonin receptors, and in a phosphodiesterase.  All of these changes might be expected to limit the ability to induce sensitization, which would be consistent with the BCM rule (once synapses are facilitated, raise the threshold for further facilitation).  (Bienenstock, Cooper, & Munro, 1982).

One of the very intriguing findings to come out of this study is that the transcriptional changes occuring during encoding are very distinct from those occuring during maintenance.  We found only about 20 transcripts regulated during both time points.  We think those transcripts might be especially important, as they could play a key regulatory/organizing role that spans from induction through maintenance.  One of these transcripts encoded a peptide transmitter called FMRF-amide.  This is an inhibitory transmitter, which raises the possibility that as the memory is encoded, inhibitory processes are simultaneously working to limit or even erode the expression of the memory (a form of active forgetting).

There are lots of exciting pathways for us to explore from this intriguing data set.  We feel confident heading down these paths because a) we used a reasonable sample size for the microarray, and b) we found incredibly strong convergent validity in an independent set of samples using qPCR.

This is a big day for the Slug Lab, and a wonderful moment of celebration for the many students who helped bring this project to fruition: Catherine Conte (applying to PT schools), Samantha Herdegen (in pharmacy school), Saman Kamal (in medical school), Jency Patel (about to graduate), Ushma Patel (about to graduate), Leticia Perez (about to graduate), and Marissa Rivota (just graduated).  We’re so proud of these students and so fortunate to work with such a talented and fun group.

Bienenstock, E., Cooper, L., & Munro, P. (1982). Theory for the development of neuron selectivity: orientation specificity and binocular interaction in visual cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience : The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2(1), 32–48. [PubMed]
Conte, C., Herdegen, S., Kamal, S., Patel, J., Patel, U., Perez, L., … Calin-Jageman, I. E. (2017). Transcriptional correlates of memory maintenance following long-term sensitization of Aplysia californica. Learning and Memory, 24, 502–515. doi: 10.1101/lm.045450117 [Source]
Herdegen, S., Holmes, G., Cyriac, A., Calin-Jageman, I. E., & Calin-Jageman, R. J. (2014). Characterization of the rapid transcriptional response to long-term sensitization training in Aplysia californica. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 116, 27–35. doi: 10.1016/j.nlm.2014.07009