Lab news

Very pleased we have been awarded a research project grant from the Leverhulme Trust to develop our work on mitochondrial dynamics combined with optogenetics. We will be looking to recruit a postdoctoral researcher soon.

Our collaborative work describing the Drosophila ortholog of mammalian Pdzd8 and the consequences of reducing pdzd8-mediated MERCS in Drosophila neurons is published in Life Science Alliance (link). Congrats to all involved!

Congratulations to Emily who won the BCN best talk prize at the KCL Neuroscience PhD Symposium! Smashed it!

Visa nightmare is over – Lucia has come back as a postdoctoral research assistant to pick up where she had left last year and continue her work on mitochondrial contact sites in neurons.

Francesca had her PhD VIVA and successfully defended her thesis. First PhD student from the lab and she passed with flying colours. Impressive job. Very well done!

Alessio is talking at the Axonal Degeneration and Regeneration Workshop at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Japan) (link). Nice focused meeting – just a pity we couldn’t get to visit the beautiful Okinawa!

Francesca will kick off the new season of the London Fly Meeting. Very nice to be able to meet people in person again (and to finally have a lab outing afterwards!).

Evie is starting a PhD with us after a lab rotation through the MRC-DTP scheme. She will co-supervised by Deepak Srivastava (BCN, MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders) and will work on the interplay between intracellular trafficking and neuronal health during ageing and neurodegeneration.

Lucia is coming over for a few months from the University of Padova, Italy (Calí group). She will do live imaging of the contact sites between the mitochondria and other cellular organelles in flies.

Congratulations to Kristal who won the BCN PhD poster prize at the KCL Neuroscience PhD Symposium! Well deserved Kris!

Two new preprints from the lab posted in Research Square. Both are step-by-step methods for studying the dynamics of neuronal mitochondria, one in Drosophila in vivo (bit.ly/3vicuGT) and another in differentiated SH-SY5Y cells (bit.ly/3wtxKcK). The preprints include super-resolution imaging of mitochondrial transport in adult Drosophila and the generation of new transgenic Drosophila lines for CALI experiments (bit.ly/3vicuGT), and super-resolution imaging of mitochondrial and mtDNA dynamics in the neurites of cultured neuronal-like cells (bit.ly/3wtxKcK).

Alessio is giving a (remote) talk at the Oxford University Chemistry and Biochemistry (OUCB) Society. The talk will be centred around intracellular trafficking, neurodegeneration and neuronal ageing.

Francesca will be giving a talk at the Dynamic Cell IV conference. She will be showing some of her PhD work which includes our own foray into optogenetics.

We contributed to this collaborative study spearheaded by Victoria Hewitt from the Whitworth and Polleux labs (MRC-MBU and Columbia University). The study describes the Drosophila ortholog of mammalian Pdzd8 and the consequences of reducing pdzd8-mediated MERCS in Drosophila neurons.

Great to participate in the Biological Sciences virtual seminar series of the University of Buffalo. Very good discussion and insightful comments about previous and current work of the lab. It was nice to see many curious students asking such good questions!

István is (remotely) with us for two months thanks to a summer studentship from the British Society for Cell Biology. He will work on an in silico project which aims to characterise the intracellular trafficking and functionality of mitochondria in the neurons of mouse dorsal root ganglia.

After just over three months of closure due to lockdown, the lab reopened (and we are quite happy about it). Yes, we are working at very reduced capacity but we take it!

Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, as of 20th March we are temporary suspending all research activities. The lab is transitioning onto a remote-working routine.

Alessio starts the year by giving a talk at the 28^th Israel Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in the session ‘Mitochondria in the CNS in health and disease’. He will then give a talk at Tel Aviv University to further discuss some of the new work from the lab.

We are going to participate to the UK Trafficking meeting that will take place on 16^th December in the Cruciform Building at UCL, with a reception at the LMCB after.

Our collaborative work with the Miller lab (King’s College London) shows that phosphorylation of kinesin light chain on a specific residue is important to modulate APP trafficking and metabolism in neurons of rats and fruit flies and in HEK293 cells (link)

Sandy joins the lab as a postdoctoral research assistant to work on the cell biology of mouse dorsal root ganglion neurons (DRGs) during ageing.

Alessio will return to Cambridge to present new results from the group at the Cambridge Fly Club (Gurdon Institute).

Kristal joins the lab as PhD candidate to work on the link between mitochondrial dysfunction and intracellular trafficking in Drosophila and mammalian cells.

Emily starts her PhD with us to study how intracellular trafficking is governed in a model of human neuronal ageing.

Our Mini Review on axonal transport during ageing has been published in Frontiers Cellular Neuroscience (link)! Our article is part of the research topic “The Fast and the Furious: Axonal Transport Defects in Sickness, Injury and Aging”.