Author: Julie

Watch this week’s CAN Trainee Research feature, with Claire Gizowski, who recently obtained her PhD at McGill University, working with Dr. Charles Bourque. She presents the publication:

Gizowski C, Bourque CW. Sodium regulates clock time and output via an excitatory GABAergic pathway. Nature. 2020 Jul;583(7816):421-424. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2471-x.

Dr. Gizowski is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California in San Francisco https://profiles.ucsf.edu/claire.gizowski

More videos are also available here, with submission instructions

https://can-acn.org/can-trainee-research-features/

We are excited to launch a new opportunity for Canadian neuroscience trainees to showcase their research through short video features.  We aim to make this a weekly feature and to share on our website and social media accounts, so please consider submitting a proposal to us.  We would love to feature your research!

This week’s feature is: Tasnia Rahman, McGill University – Stentian structural plasticity in the developing visual system

Read the paper here: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/20/10636

Videos will be also available here, with submission instructions

https://can-acn.org/can-trainee-research-features/

Congratulations to the Canadian neuroscientists newly elected fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, and to the incoming class of the college of new scientists.

Continue reading →

Early deficits in the formation of brain blood vessels translate into later autistic traits in mice

A Canadian collaboration led by Dr. Baptiste Lacoste has undertaken the first ever in-depth study of vasculature in the autistic brain. The product of four years of work, a paper published in the September issue of Nature Neuroscience lays out several lines of novel evidence that strongly implicate defects in endothelial cells—the lining of blood vessels—in autism.

Dr. Lacoste, a scientist at The Ottawa Hospital and an assistant professor in the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine and Brain and Mind Research institute, heads a lab that specializes in neurovascular interactions in health and disease. In collaboration with researchers at McGill University, Laval University, and the National Research Council of Canada, Dr. Lacoste’s team used a mouse model with one of the most common genetic mutations found in autism spectrum disorder—16p11.2 deletion, or “16p” for short. Continue reading →

A research team at CHU Sainte-Justine highlights the mechanisms underlying memory and learning capacity – specifically, how our brains process, store and integrate information.

How does our brain store information?

Seeking an answer, researchers at CHU Sainte-Justine and Université de Montréal have made a major discovery in understanding the mechanisms underlying learning and memory formation.

The results of their study are presented in Nature Communications.

Led by Professor Roberto Araya, the team studied the function and morphological transformation of dendritic spines, tiny protrusions located on the branches of neurons, during synaptic plasticity, thought to be the underlying mechanism for learning and memory. Continue reading →

Researchers at the CRCHUM find a new structure by which cells in the retina communicate with each other, regulating blood supply to keep vision intact

Montreal, August 12, 2020 — A new mechanism of blood redistribution that is essential for the proper functioning of the adult retina has just been discovered in vivo by researchers at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM).

Their study was published in Nature.

“For the first time, we have identified a communication structure between cells that is required to coordinate blood supply in the living retina,” said Dr. Adriana Di Polo, a neuroscience professor at Université de Montréal and holder of a Canada Research Chair in glaucoma and age-related neurodegeneration, who supervised the study. Continue reading →