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Ion channels are my favorite proteins

As many of my readers know, I am a graduate student pursuing a PhD in molecular neuroscience. For those that think I'm crazy, maybe I am, but I hope you will feel a little crazy too after hearing a bit more about why I've chosen this path... Unless you are a student of neurophysiology or unlucky enough to have epilepsy you probably have never heard of ion channels. Ion channels are the proteins that control the “electricity” of your nervous system. Just like the components in an electrical circuit (resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc.),   ion channels are tiny elements in the circuitry of your brain. Ion channels switch on and off in precise ways to control when and where bioelectricity flows in your brain (and body).   I didn’t know ion channels existed until 2012 when I took a class in the Hendrix College Psychology department titled “Sensation and Perception.” It was here that I learned how my interaction with the world around me - my sense of taste, smell,
Recent posts

Type 2 diabetes - a membrane trafficking disease?

I heard a great talk yesterday by Dr. Patrik Rorsman from the University of Oxford, who has a new way of thinking about type 2 diabetes. He believes some individuals who develop the disease may have a deficit in insulin exocytosis, but not by the mechanism that anyone would have predicted. It is abundantly clear that type-2 diabetes is not caused by a lack of available insulin in the pancreas. Therefore, Dr. Rorsman hypothesized that the mechanism of exocytic release of insulin may be perturbed in diabetic patients. However, when he made classical measurements to detect exocytic release in primary tissues, such as amperometry of cargo release and monitoring membrane capacitance, he saw no differences between healthy and diseased cells. It wasn’t until he engineered an elegant ATP-sensitive, feedback biosensor into his recording set-up that he detected a difference in exocytosis. What he found suggests that the equilibrium between kiss-and-run and full-fusion exoc

My Must-See Science at BPS18

As I’m reading through the abstracts for Biophysics 2018, I can’t help but get excited about all the cutting-edge research there is to discover at this meeting! Although my schedule is double and triple booked with talks and posters, I’ve bookmarked one of each type of presentation as absolute must-sees. Check it out! Sub-group Saturday talk: Progress in developing (single) inorganic voltage nanosensors Shimon Weiss (Bar Ilan University; UCLA) Nanoscale Biophysics Subgroup; Esplanade, Room 160 Saturday, 1:35 PM Why I’m excited: This is an approach to voltage-imaging that I’m not familiar with. Although great improvements have been made to genetically encoded voltage sensors, non-invasive voltage imaging is another story. I anticipate some impressive movies at this talk of membrane-embedded nanosensors detecting single action potentials! Platform talk: Dissecting function and distribution of sodium channels and gap junctional proteins using super-resolution patch-cla

Blogging for Biophysics!

Just a quick announcement: The next couple posts are going to be cross-published on the Biophysical Society blog as part of their national meeting. I get to write about exciting, often unpublished biophysics research while I attend the conference. Exciting! You can visit the BPS blog here , or just continue reading on this site. Enjoy!

Food for Thought

Last week I learned something wild about our brains and bodies that has to do with the way we taste food. It turns out our body knows when we are eating something nutritive or when we are just eating junk. Okay, I know you’re freaking out right now because somehow your brain is keeping track of when you eat a kale salad vs. a fried chicken thigh – like Santa making his naughty vs nice list – but that’s not quite what I mean. What I mean is that your brain knows when the food you’re eating contains calories or not. The crazy thing is that when your fed and happy, your brain doesn’t care whether you eat energy-rich foods or not and your preferences are dominated by flavor. However, if you find yourself stranded on a desert island going on a week without food, your brain is going to know whether you climbed that tree for the juicy, sweet coconut or whether you slammed that last Sweet-N-Low packet you’ve been saving in your pocket since your plane crashed. This is research I heard ab

Things we see when our eyes are closed

I would guess most of you don’t spend much time with your eyes closed for the sole purpose of looking at the backs of your eyelids. I don't either. In fact, the only reason this topic is on my mind at all is because recently I have been treating some intermittent eye-itchiness by applying warm compresses to my closed lids. This requires me to spend several minutes with my eyes shut with nothing to do but watch the backs of my eyelids. How pleasantly surprised I was to find that there is ample entertainment back there to keep me from either going crazy or falling asleep. What I discovered while reclining with a hot towel on my face were phosphenes: brilliant patterns of light, pulsing and evolving with intricate motion and color, intensified by the application of  pressure on my covered lids. You've probably seen phosphenes before, perhaps while rubbing your weary eyes or while dosing off in a pitch dark room, but have you ever purposely tried to evoke