Actus

Don't miss Valentin Nägerl at the CRI on wednesday 1st July 2009, special guest of Neurobiology & Optics club.


Valentin Nägerl, PhD

Nanoscale imaging of living synapses by STED microscopy

Synapses are physical sites of intercellular contact that transmit and transform information in a very rapid and flexible way. They represent incredibly complex and dynamic networks of signaling proteins aggregated in a tiny space (<1µm3), making it a huge experimental challenge to study them in situ. As a result, a lot of our understanding of the properties of single synapses is derived from electron microscopy of fixed tissue samples, which is by definition not well suited for understanding the dynamic processes of synapses.
We are studying the dynamics of living synapses with a new laser-scanning fluorescence microscopy technique, STED imaging, which has vastly improved spatial resolution (at the nanoscale) compared to conventional light microscopy. Expanding our previous research, we are investigating key structural and cell-biological mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, imaging morphology and constituent proteins of synapses in living brain slices on spatial scales relevant to synapse physiology.

Valentin Nägerl
Professor of Neuroscience and Bioimaging
Avenir Group - Synaptic Plasticity and Superresolution Microscopy
Inserm U862/Université Victor Segalen Bordeaux 2
146, rue Léo Saignat
33076 Bordeaux
France
Phone: +33/557571097
Fax: +33/557571684
Email: Cet e-mail est protégé contre les robots collecteurs de mails, votre navigateur doit accepter le Javascript pour le voir

More info, CV and publications on the next page.

WISER-U stands for Web Interaction for Science, Education and Research

The aim of this project is to explore open source web tools that will change the way we learn and teach at the university in the very next years.



Please visit our on line activities :

- a website with our community : http://wiser-u.net

- a wiki : http://wiser-u.net/wiki/
where we test existing tools and try to design new tools. .

- a video to introduce the project : http://vimeo.com/7095098

- a photo gallery : Wiser u workshop @ pekin university summer 2009
The CRI and the CTB (from PKU) co-organized two workshops in july and august 2009 about these topics.

- Paris contact : Cet e-mail est protégé contre les robots collecteurs de mails, votre navigateur doit accepter le Javascript pour le voir

17:00 next tuesday 16 June 2009, Agnes Ullmann, special guest of the Genome club !

Seminar on the french school of molecular biology in the sixties.



link to the poster in full size: Poster agnes ullman seminar.jpg

Pr Fritjof Helmchen, Neurobiology and optics club guest

This Friday 12 June 2009 at 18:00 at the CRI, Professor Fritjof Helmchen will be among us.

Professor Fritjof Helmchen is performing his research at the border between Neuroscience and physics. He investigates the dynamics of neuronal activity in the intact brain of anesthetized and awake animals by using innovative optical mesurements methods that allow him to track the spiking activity of hundreds of neurons deep into the (almost) intact cortex of
mammals. He has also been developping miniaturized microscopes allowing him to explore optically the cortical activity in freely moving mice.
The prospect of exploring optically the cortex as a dynamical 3D structure is wildly regarded as key to a full understanding of this complex brain structure. Pr. Helmchen has been a pionner and published a series of milestone articles in this transdisciplinary field. A list of his key articles can be found at the end of this message.

Further description of his precise work can be found at :
http://www.hifo.uzh.ch/research/neurophysiology/helmchen/interest.html

His full Curriculum Vitae can be found at :
http://www.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de/departments/cellPhysiology/zpProjects/2pImaging/fritjofHelmchen/fritjofHelmchenCV/index.html

* Engelbrecht CE, Johnston RS, Seibel EJ, Helmchen F (2008) Ultra-compact
fiber-optic two-photon microscope for functional fluorescence imaging in
vivo. Optics Express, 16:5556-5564.
* Göbel W, Kampa BM, Helmchen F (2007) Imaging cellular network dynamics
in three dimensions using fast 3D laser scanning. Nature Methods 4: 73-79.
2006
* Helmchen F, and Denk W (2005) Deep tissue two-photon microscopy. Nature
Methods, 2(12): 932-940.
* Nimmerjahn A, Kirchhoff F, and Helmchen F (2005) Resting microglial
cells are highly dynamic surveillants of brain parenchyma in vivo.
Science, 308:1314-1318.
* Göbel W, Kerr NDJ, Nimmerjahn A, and Helmchen F (2004) Miniaturized
twp-photon microscope based on a flexible coherent fiber bundle and a
gradient-index lens objective. Optics Letters, 29(21) : 2521-2523.
* Nimmerjahn A, Kirchhoff F, Kerr NDJ, and Helmchen F (2004)
Sulforhodamine 101 as a specific marker of astroglia in the neocortex in
vivo. Nature Methods, 1(1) : 31-37.

Tuesday 9 June 2009 , at 18:00, we are honoured to host at the CRI Prof. Eshel Ben Jacob, of the Physics department, Tel-Aviv University, presenting his work on "Learning from bacteria about information processing"

Prof. Ben Jacob is the holder of the Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex Systems, fellow of the American Physical Society and former President of the Israel Physical Society. Scientific American magazine placed his work on the creation of a type of organic memory chip on its list of the year's 50 most significant scientific discoveries...

Abstract

Bacteria, the first and most fundamental of all organisms, lead rich social life in complex hierarchical communities. Collectively, they gather information from the environment, learn from past experience, and take decisions. Bacteria do not store genetically all the information required for efficient responding to all possible environmental conditions. To solve the new encountered problems (challenges) posed by the environment, they first asses the problem via collective sensing, recall stored information of past experience and then execute distributed information processing of the 109-12 bacteria in the colony thus turning the colony into super-brain. Super-brain, because the billions of bacteria in the colony use sophisticated communication strategies to link the intracellular computation networks of each bacterium (including signaling path ways of billions of molecules) into a network of networks. I will then show illuminating movies of swarming intelligence of live bacteria in which they solve optimization problems that are beyond what we, human being, can solve with our most powerful computers. This will lead me to a discussion about the special nature of bacteria computational principles in comparison to our Turing Algorithm computational principles. If time will permit, I will show that we can learn from the bacteria about our brain. In particular that the crucial role of the neglected other side of the brain - distributed information processing of the astrocytes.

next : recent publications