Monday, September 30th from 6:00-7:00 is our first Journal Club of the year! At each Journal Club, we will be going through and discussing an academic neuroscience paper as a group in a way that everyone can understand. It’s a fantastic way to learn the ins and outs of reading scientific papers and about some of the newest innovations in the field of Neuroscience. This week, we will be discussing a paper that presents a strategy to better study variants of human genes that are implicated in various cognitive disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, using model organisms, genetic engineering and automated machine vision. This paper was written by a PhD candidate from right here at UBC!

Read the paper!

Hope to see you there!

Next Monday October 1 from 5:30-6:30 in IKB 185 is our first Journal Club of the year! Each Journal Club we will be analyzing an academic neuroscience paper as a group, and ensuring everyone understands the context. This week, we will be discussing a paper on the effects of cytokines released by the maternal and fetal immune system on fetal brain development. This is in preparation for the author, Dr. Staci D. Bilbo (from Harvard Medical School) to present at the Centre for Brain Health at UBC this Friday!

This week, we’ll be holding another Journal Club meeting on Thursday, February 8th from 5:30-6:30pm at the Michael Kingsmill Forum in the UBC Nest (4th floor). We’ll be taking a look at a review paper by Bita Moghaddam (from the Oregon Health and Science University) titled, “Impact of Anxiety on Prefrontal Cortex Encoding of Cognitive Flexibility” (attached below). The paper takes a look at the negative effects of anxiety on cognitive flexibility and decision-making. We will be reviewing this paper to in our prepration for Dr. Moghaddam’s talk (titled “Translation of anxiety into actions by prefrontal cortex”) at the Neuroscience Research Colloquia at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health this Friday, February 9th at 11:00am.

Next week, on Friday February 2nd, DMCBH Neuroscience Colloquium is hosting Dr. Hanchaun Peng from the Allen Brain Institute to talk about large-scale brain imaging and connectivity datasets. In next week’s journal club will on (Thursday, February 1) we’ll meet in the Kingsmill Forum (4th floor in The Nest, UBC) at 5:30 PM, to discuss large-scale brain imaging and the connectome. 

To get familiar with the topic of Dr. Peng’s talk and the work of the Allen Brain Institute, we’ll be covering this paper from the Allen Brain Institute team in our journal club: Oh, S.,… Zeng, H. (2014). A mesoscale connectome of the mouse brain. Nature, 508(7495), 207–214.

The journal club is open to all students (undergraduates and graduates). Please read the article and join us for a discussion on how and whether a connectome is useful in understanding neural circuit function. For an interesting  background read on this much-debated issue, you can take a look at whether the C.Elegens connectome has been useful in explaining this worm’s behaviour (article from the Scientific American) 

The Allen Brain Institute is actively working on large-scale characterization and mapping of the mouse brain and they’ve created many helpful visualization of the mouse brain atlas  – we’ll also touch on these in the journal club, in case they might be helpful in your research projects.

There won’t be a journal club for this week. Stay tuned for next week’s meeting on November 16th!

This week UNC will be hosting an open Journal Club on Thursday, November 2nd from 5:30pm-6:30pm in BUCH B219. Bring in an article (that has applications to Neuroscience) and give a brief 10-15 minute presentation summarizing its methods and findings! It’ll be a great opportunity to share your interests to your peers and practice your presentation skills. Or, if you don’t want to present, you’re still welcome to come and hear others discuss some awesome Neuroscience research! Hope to see you on Thursday.

Ever wonder how Charlie Sheen keeps #winning? Ever question the validity behind DJ Khaled’s “All I do is win, win, win, no matter what”?

Turns out, their history of winning is actually justifed by Neuroscience research! Zhou et. al have found that a history of winning remodels the thalamo-PFC circuit to reinforce social dominance. In other words, those who win are likely to win again!

To learn more about the Neuroscience behind winning and social dominance, come out to UNC’s Journal Club meeting this Thursday in BUCH B219 from 5:30-6:30pm. You can find the paper below

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