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,
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