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 Our traditional holiday celebration at The Red Lounge (formerly The Red Room). Pictures are posted here. Happy holidays to all from the franklandlab!
 Another successful PhD defense. Yesterday Anne Wheeler expertly defended her PhD thesis. In the lab she has pioneered the use of brainwide imaging and graph theoretical approaches to visualize fear memory networks in mice. (Right, Anne [with Maithe] at Molly Blooms celebrating last night)
 Our new web project– neuroflocks– tracked tweets at SfN11. On the site, there’s lots of detailed day-by-day analyses of tweets and, on the left, is a network illustrating the most influential twitterers at the meeting.
 Last week was the SfN meeting in Washington DC. The lab was represented by Yosuke, Katherine, Alonso and Loren who presented posters. Pictures are now posted here.
 Scellig defended his PhD successfully on Friday (he’s the one seated, not standing, at the bar). He did a fantastic job on the thesis (see this and this) and also on the defense. We were honored to welcome Rene Hen as the external examiner.
 In time for the neuroscience meeting, here’s a new lab, web-based project: Neuroflocks. What is this, you may ask? Well, it’s a way of following SfN-related tweeting live throughout the meeting. Anything using the #sfn11 hashtag will be tracked. There’ll be all kinds of cool day-by-day analyses of tweets and trends from the meeting, and we hope some interesting stuff emerges from all the noise. At SfN2010 there were ~3000 tweets, and we expect this to increase significantly this year. For a preview of what to expect here are our analyses of tweeting at last year’s meeting. This project has been developed by Leonardo, Chen, Anne, Adelaide and Valentina (above, L to R).
This adds to our other web-based projects in the lab. First there’s this website, and then earlier in the year we launched sciple.org. An update on sciple.org. We have a whole load of interviews with neuroscientists posted, as well as some other cool stuff. Check it out at www.sciple.org.
UPDATE: Neuroflocks has been selected as an official blogger for the SfN meeting!
 Some changes in the last few months. Postdoc Tony Yu has taken a position as a research associate at Columbia University. And joining us is Blake Richards. Blake did his PhD work at Oxford with Colin Akerman, but now is returning home to Canada. Here’s the new lab picture.
 The neuroscience meeting (in DC this year) is just around the corner. Here’s a word-cloud preview of this year’s abstracts from the Frankland lab (we stole this idea from Charan Ranganath’s Dynamic Memory Lab website!). There’s a lot of neurogenesis this year! Alonso, Loren, Katherine and Yosuke have posters.
 It’s more or less accepted as fact—the idea that blocking adult neurogenesis impairs hippocampal memory. But if you dig a little deeper the picture is considerably less clear-cut. While there are certainly many papers showing that suppressing neurogenesis impairs subsequent hippocampal learning, there are also published examples where the same type of manipulations have no effect (Deng et al published an excellent review of both the effect and no effect papers). It is also likely the case that these ‘no effect’ papers represent just the tip of the iceberg (with many experiments showing no effect lurking below the surface, unlikely ever to be published). Why then, in these cases, do pre-training manipulations of adult neurogenesis have no effect on hippocampal learning? One challenge is that adult-generated neurons represent only a small fraction of all dentate granule cells, and when they’re removed before learning, there’s a huge potential for compensation by the large numbers of remaining granule cells. (In fact this is criticism you often hear from non-adult neurogenesis types). One way around this would be to first allow this population to become integrated into a memory trace (i.e., to become memory-committed) and then to remove them. This is exactly what Maithe Arruda-Carvalho and Masa Sakaguchi have done in a new paper from our lab (that’s them above, receiving a travel award to present these data at a SfN meeting a couple of years ago). They developed a genetic approach to conditionally ablate populations of adult-generated neurons, and contrasted the effects of removing these cells before or after memory formation. Only the after training ablation led to memory deficits, suggesting that if new neurons are around they become integrated into memory traces and come to represent a critical component of that trace. However, if they’re not around, then existing granule cells (for the most part generated during development) can do the job.
These results are published in The Journal of Neuroscience, and a pdf is available here.
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