Website relaunch

Capt. Axon

 I heart brains the site is becoming a reality.

The site is usable at homebase.iheartbrains.org one day I will work out how to have it run at a clearer address. If you wish for a iheartbrains.org email address contact me at tony.harley(at)iheartbrains.org and I will make it so. It will also appear less rough in the coming days as I get to grips with the template. Any feedback is super welcome.

So come and enjoy the adventures of Captain Axon and Princess Dendrite as they sail the good ship Amygdala across the oceans of Cortexia and I can set you up as a user.

In other news. My good friend Ben White has published the first of his Clover Island novels. Miya Black: Pirate Princess is the tale of a frustrated daughter of the kings and queen of Clover Island (former pirate and princess respectively) who dreams of adventure on the high seas. Needless to say adventure and excitement find her.... Have a read for gratis and if you like it contact myself or Ben and we can make arrangements for distribution of the high quality paper-back edition. Here are the opening paragraphs.......

"Miya Black was thirteen years old and annoyed. She was thirteen years old because her fourteenth birthday wasn’t for another couple of days. She was annoyed because her upcoming birthday celebration was going to include a formal dance.
“Mum, I hate that kind of thing. You know I hate that kind of thing. Don’t you pay any attention to my loves and hates at all?”
Miya’s mother was Lilith ‘Lily’ Black, queen of Clover Island and ex-princess. She had long black hair and dark eyes, and was often remembered by people as being tall, although in fact she was of slightly below-average height.
“Come on, Miya,” she said. “You like dancing. Everyone likes dancing! Who doesn’t like dancing? Name me one person that doesn’t like dancing.”
“Peggles, down at the docks,” Miya’s father put in. Her father was Tomas ‘Boots’ Black, king of Clover Island and ex-pirate. He had short, wavy brown hair and deep hazel eyes, and a kind of relaxed air about him that extended from the way he sat to the way he smiled. “He’s got two wooden legs, I’m sure he wouldn’t enjoy dancing.”"

Mr boss Peter Joyce with Prof. Fraser

-


Also my other boss, Prof. Martin Kennedy and Prof. Doug Sellman the addiction medicine expert.

Jo and Prof. Fraser see Christchurch's new PET/CT scanner

I asked the professor in charge of nuclear medicine if this was going to be availiable with ligands over than deoxyglucose. The answer was a firm No. Hopefully neuroresearch will get a bit of this beast sooner rather than later.

Prof. Fraser and his Black and Decker.....

Smarter hamsters

John Rosenburg from Goats.com fame has established his new web comic, Scenes From A Multiverse. So, so, good.

The science-master featured in the cartoon is striving to boost Hamster intellegence. It has been a while since I looked into the current literature on Sooped up super smart rodents. So I had a wee look see.

In 2000 one of the earlier strains of transgenic knock-in mice was announced. These animals expressed extra neurotransmitter receptors in the the hippocampal brain region. This receptor, the NMDA subunit is special in that it is only activated glutamate in situations where the cell is already stimulated and when I does open a soup of high Calcium fluid enters. Calcium influx from this is the "go-switch" for making permanent new connections. Turns out these mice were twice as good at learning tasks than their litter mates. They were media darlings and were called "Doogie mice".  This advantage is maintained over the entire lifespan (about 400 days).

At the end of last year a new contender stepped up Hobbie-J. This is one of the latest and greatest strains of transgenic rats (much harder to engineer rats than mice). Hobbie-J rats also overexpress NMDA receptors and are also super smart.

While these rodents are engineered nerds their is also a strain of engineered jocks.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcXuKU_kfww This video is fantastic, they are strong, fitter, faster and live longer. They are also more aggressive.

These models have resulted in developments toward the treatment of dementia and sarcopenia (the progressive loss of muscle bulk which occurs in older people) and are not a mere curiosity.

Go Rodents!

My first TV spot

High-Powered Air Guns. No good reason.

Just look at this weapon. All the factors to make a gun nut cream himself. A pistol gripped, bi-poded, noise suppressed,  scoped, single action sniper rifle. Described by the merchant as "The Gunpower Storm. A high-performance take-down hunting rifle which also serves as an accurate target shooting gun".  Its all yours from www.guncity.co.nz for $1,999.00 including GST plus postage and packaging. No licence needed. Just flash your id and this killer is yours. This is an example of the high-powered air rifles that have received coverage due to the two recent homocides of the Don Wilkinson and Keith Kahi.


As you can see these are definitely not your average bb gun for shooting cans. I have commented on Gun-City before. This store, based in suburban Christchurch prides itself on being "New Zealand's Largest Gun Dealer". They import and sell by mail-order restricted military style semi-automatics to holders of endorsed licences, this I have only a little beef with, if a gun nut is willing to undergo the police vetting and individual registration required for the endorsement they are likely to be collectors who will use and store them safely. My BIG beef with them is their sale of military style weapons that have been modified just enough to be sold to persons with a standard licence (over 16, no police record) and are not required to be registered with the police. The weapons, like this modern AK-47 below, are from the factories as their military cousins, they have a shorter magazine and the pistol-grip (not removed as you can see) is incorporated into the stock those are the only modifications. Do you really want kids marching through high-schools with one of these? There is no good reason for owning these, if you want to hunt deer, buy a hunting rifle.


Criminal's will use what they can get. Hence the use of the traditional kiwi sawn-off .22 for pub, dairy and bank robberies.  These high-powered pre-charged air-rifles are just the next step up and look a hell of a lot more dangerous than, and are, a 50 year old rabbit gun stolen from a farm-house. The next level of escalation will be to these unregistered assault weapons.


The last time our gun laws were revised was post-Aramoana. I hope this week's two tragic episodes, the death of Keith Kahi in Auckland, the Christchurch slaying of Gage the police dog, will bring to gun-control to the forefront of political debate and the need to make changes to the availability of all firearms to the public. My big wish is for the sale of assault style weapons to be banned before too many are out and about in our communities. And prevent another Aramoana or heaven forbid a Columbine.  I wonder if the folk at Gun-City ever listen to the Mutton Birds song, a thing well made, this tells the story of a Christchurch gun dealer going about his work in the early 1990's. The collector down the line was D.M. Gray and this is his AK-47.

it's Wednesday

so I do the mail orders

there's nothing much

some oilskins and a 303

for a hunter over in Westland

and oh yeah

one of those AK-47s

for some collector down the line

-A thing well made: Don McGlashen

Peace,

Tony.

Antidepressants make shrimps see the light

Antidepressants make shrimps see the light

Maybe these shrimp or sea monkeys will make an interesting alternative model to determine antidepressant effects. It certainly has to be cheaper than using mice! Are there other advantages?

The standard measures in mice are related to despair behaviour which include tail-suspension and forced-swimming time. Both of these look at how long it takes for the animal to give up, sit and hang still or stick out their legs and float. Drugs or gene manipulations with antidepressant actions increase the time of these escape related movements. Other more sophisticated studies have looked at despair in relation to chronic-social defeat, where a little boy-mouse is exposed to a larger more aggressive man-mouse. This pattern of early life stress leads to the animal developing a phenotype similar to human depression. They stop enjoying their sweet treat biscuits (often froot-loops), groom less frequently and are less interested in hanging with other mice or use their cage toys.  These paradigms are challenging to set up and require continuous dosing for ~2weeks.

In that we understand so little about the mechanisms of action of antidepressants is it about time we go back to basic models? These shrimp move towards the light. Other folk have shown the microscopic worm C. elegans changes the way it moves his snout. What more can we learn from these simple, highly-tuned organisms, about drugs which are used to treat people experiencing their darkest times? 

Predicting clinical response to medicines in psychiatry by genetics and inflammatory markers in blood

A number of you know that when I am not at medical school I  into the proverbial phone booth and become "neuroscience man". Over the last year or so some of the fruit of my labours are ripening and a couple of papers have come of it.

The focus of my thesis has been more flood light than laser. During the last four years I have studied the ability of peripheral markers to explain aspects of the presentation of depression and predict the outcome of the treatment.  I have also been looking at the genetics of personality, the genetics of psychotropic drug-induced appetite change and the bulk of my work lately revolves around giving antidepressants to rats and screening the mRNA expression all of the ~30,000 rat genes in their blood to identify candidate biomarkers for human trials.


But? you ask. "But depression is a brain disease why look in the blood?" the reason is clear for us. To have any chance at realistically developing tests in the clinic to be used by prescribers, GPs and Psychiatrists, you cannot have them expect to tell the patient "in order to better manage your mood disorder, I am going to need a small slice of your hippocampus". Oh dear! Better to ask "now we need a 5ml blood sample to help us predict what treatment is best for you". Much nicer.


To those that were keen to see our recently published papers in the Journal of Pharmacology here they are:

Orosomuciod influences antidepressant response

Elevated CRP predicts good outcome for antidepressant treatment and poor to psychotherapy.

The other paper that we have recently gotten out there is this one in Acta Neuropsychiatrica:

Polymorphism upstream from INSIG2 influences response to carnitine in valproate-induced weight gain

Mess with your mind and play with your heart.

Internal organs don't get good press as childrens toys. Too icky, bloody and gross. The wonderful people at iheartguts.com have created and sell wonderful cute playthings of all your favourite vicsera.

Keen to be involved?

Make sure you join the i *heart* brains facebook group.

And here is the latest incarnation of the i*heart*brains t-shirt

http://www.zazzle.co.nz/iheartbrains/gifts

New Ideas in Neuroscience

Hey there,

Do you ever get a great idea (or an idea you THINK is great) for a neuroscience research project but don't have the time, background, resources or inclination to go and do it? I know I do. And once the idea is abandoned that's it, over rover for that concept. What if you had shared the idea with someone? Mightn't they be able to give an independent view of how "great" it is? If it is great, then maybe some of those you have shared with do have the time, background, training, resources and the enthusiasm to carry through to develop and test the idea towards completion. i*heart*brains is a forum that enables the sharing of neuroscience ideas to this end, allowing new concepts to be shared, discussed and potentially acted upon by experimental and theorical neuroscientists.

Ideally I*Heart*Brains would become a resource for generation new ideas for grant applications, student projects and new collaborations. What do you think? Is the neuroscience world ready for the free sharing of ideas. In this context I cannot see a reason to not. The thoughts and concepts that we generate every day which subsquently are forgotten, stuffed deep in the filing cabinet or scrawled in a notebook deserve to expanded upon, discussed and informally archived.

Best wishes to you all,

Tony.