Blogging on the Brain

The second day of SfN brought a couple of interesting presentations. The first was a talk by T.C. Sudhof of Stanford entitled “From Synapses to Autism: Neurexins, Neuroligins, and More.” I went to the session primarily because autism was in the title, plus the fact that I really didn’t know anything about neurexins and neuroligins, and I thought that maybe I should. As I sat through the talk and scribbled notes down, I felt like I was sort of following everything okay, but now looking back at my notes, I’m feeling a bit lost – I really should make myself do this the same day – sigh. Oh well. Here’s what I can make out from my notes:

Neurocircuitry is incredibly important to keep in mind when attempting to understand the massive processing capacity of our brains. These circuits have properties that depend on three things: 1. Intrinsic neural properties, 2. Synaptic connectivity, and 3. Synaptic properties. Neurexins and neuroligins function as synaptic cell-adhesion molecules, therefore modulating some of these circuit properties. Specifically, neuroligins increase synaptic density – sounds simple, right? Well, like most topics in neuroscience, it gets a lot more complicated really really quickly. Neuroligins do increase synaptic density, but sometimes these synapses aren’t really functional, and if they are, you may see increased excitatory post-synaptic currents (EPSCs) and no change in inhibitory post-synaptic currents (IPSCs), or you may see an increase in IPSCs and no change in EPSCs, depending, it seems, on which alternative splicing took place in the formation of the neuroligin.

So I think the moral of the story was that neuroligins may provide a common link for many of the current theories of autism (candidate genes, neuroanatomy, etc.) thus providing an underlying mechanism to explain at least a portion of the disorder. Cool stuff, but clearly I’m going to have to read up on it…

The second exciting session I went to was concerned with using neuroscience in the classroom, which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Unfortunately, it seemed to be more about how to teach neuroscience than use neuroscientific principles in the classroom. There was, however, one presentation (it was set up as a mini-symposium, which several speakers each talking for about 15 minutes) that caught my attention. The presenter, Dr. Sally Hoskins of City College in NY talked about using a curriculum called “CREATE” (see below) to use primary literature to teach science. I thought this was a very interesting idea, especially after having talked a bit with some people involved in Baylor’s Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) program, and some of the things they’ve been talking about with their “Natural World” course.

So, the first step in this curriculum is to find several papers from the same lab that the students will read in sequence of publication date. I don’t know why this hasn’t occurred to more people in the past, but what a great way to give students an idea of how science is really done! Not only will they see how long it takes to cultivate a line of research, but they’ll actually see a line of research and how the answers to one question almost always lead to more questions to answer!  So I thought that in itself was great. In addition, they outlined 6 steps (CREATE) the students use for each paper. Here they are:

1. C: Consider. Students take the paper and read the lit review section, and make a map of all the ideas and concepts in the paper. Every student’s map turns out differently, and it’s quite a bit of work for the student, as they’ll often have to spend lots of time looking up techniques or other things that they’re not familiar with.

2. R: Read. They’ll read through the paper and draw cartoons of what actually happened in the lab. They’ll also make annotations of the figures before they come to class.

3 E: Elucidate. Students use their maps from step 1 and re-write the question that’s being answered through the research

4. A: Analyze. Students transform any data tables and reorganize the information to aid in interaction with the material and understanding of the data.

5. T: Think of the next experiment. Students are not given the next paper from the lab until they’ve finished all these steps, so each student comes up with what they think the next experiment should be (I love this step).

6. E: Experiment. Students write their proposals for ideas from the previous step, and actually form mock grant panels to eventually pick one proposal from the class that they’d fund. Different groups almost always pick different proposals, again teaching students valuable lessons about grant writing and the differences in results just depending on the people sitting on the board, not necessarily the integrity of the proposal.

These steps are then repeated with the subsequent papers from the same lab. A couple other good ideas they put forth: First, the students never receive the abstract for the article. They found that, if given the abstract, students were much less creative in their reading and interpretation of the data. Second, the class often emails the author of the papers with a short survey – and they’ve actually received many replies! So I kind of love this idea. Now I just need to find a class to try it out on!