SfN in Retrospect:
SfN this year was in the beautiful city of Chicago; aka windy city, named after its number of corrupt politicians as much as it is after its infamous, freezing winds. For me though it is the city where electronic guitar from the north met the southern blues giving birth to the music of Muddy Waters whom than fathered Chicago blues and countless other musical legends to follow.
But I’m digressing, back to the legends of the neuro world… After 5 very busy days in this wonderful city here are a few highlights of the Society for Neuroscience conference. First of all, even though SfN has not put up the official numbers for this year, there seemed to be less people when compared to the Washington meeting in 2008. I’m guessing financial crisis.
The star topics of the year, as can be assessed by a glance at the titles of the presidential lectures and other featured talks, were memory/learning and non-neuronal aspects of neuroscience – especially astrocytes.
The star of the show or as the SfN President put it ‘Bono of the Neuroscience world’ was Kandel who addressed an approximate 10,000 people. He started with his research on explicit memory using Apylasia, suggesting that cytoplasmic polyadenylation element–binding protein (CPEB) is the “inhibitory contraint to memory”. Therefore, what is stored as memory depends on CBEP activation, which is the key to mRNA translation or delay in mRNA of other proteins resulting in memory maintenance as well as a role in synaptic growth. He also talked about research with mice where CPEB-3 was found, suggesting that CPEB’s role in explicit memory and its long-term storage is conserved across species. For a more broad perspective on biology of memory: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/29/41/12748
As for the posters: There was a definite departure from the central dogma of molecular biology towards the inclusion of miRNAs in the flow of information. Coming from a Neurosurgery Department, the aisles I spent the most time, ischemia, spinal cord, TBI, all featured plethora of miRNA studies. Though most of the studies are in the profiling stage and as yet away from the establishment of miRNAs as disease markers or actual therapeutics.
Society for Neuroscience Meeting is not known to be a place where ground-breaking research is shared with the rest of the world. Still I expected more studies utilizing more recently (last 2 years) established techniques, especially in imaging aisles. Brainbow anyone?
The efforts of the EU/German Neuroscience programs to attract postdocs were noteworthy. Though this deserves a new post purely on the funding realities of the modern times as well as the future of NIH, a topic which Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, discussed during his presentation at the meeting.
Also having run into the JoVE booth at the vendor aisles, I thought I’d point out the link again. It’s the Journal of Visualized Experiments where they cover topics from doing cell cultures to running western blots to collecting tissue. Check it out, it will be worth your while.
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