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USCF Neuroscience Retreat 2010 参加報告書

Dai Xiaojing (Dept. Cellular Neurobiology, Grad. Sch. of Medicine)

There are totally 12 days which I stayed in San Francisco. Before the retreat I stopped by two labs, one of which is Dr. Allen Basbaum’s lab which is studying with the neurobiological basis of pain, the other is Dr. Lily Jan’s lab which is working on molecular studies of potassium channel and relation with disease. I thought it’s really a valuable experience to me, as well as it’s helpful to my future study.

Scheduling of San Francisco
9/14 Departure from Narita (Japan) → Arrival in SFO (San Francisco)
9/15–9/16 Mission Bay campus of UCSF (Dr. Basbaum’s lab)

In the morning, I talked with Dr. Allan Basbaum about my ongoing study. Then I talked to several postdocs in his lab. In the afternoon, I was invited by a postdoc to attend the lecture of Science for Life and enjoyed the performance of opera in Gladstone Institute of UCSF. The second day, I went to Parnassus campus to join the pain seminar which is associated with Allan’s lab. The speaker who belongs to the department of clinical medicine in medical centre, gave us a talk about the studies on facial expression and pain. After that a postdoc reported his temporal work in the lab meeting and all of lab members raised lots of experimental questions, interesting direction and some new methods of assay, all of which are worthy to try.

9/17–9/18 Mission Bay campus of UCSF (Dr. Lily Jan and Yuhnung Jan lab)

I knew one of the postdoc in Lily Jan’s lab. He introduced many postdocs and PhD students to me. I learned from them about the family of Kv, Kir channel and the relationship with axon guidance and also asked some technical questions about the electrophysiology to study the function on Kv and Kir channel as well as the basic knowledge on KO. Unbiased yeast screen was impressive to me that it is able to isolate many hundreds or thousands of randomly mutagenized channels.

9/19–9/21 Retreat at Asilomar

The retreat consisted of oral sessions and poster sessions. The oral sessions were mainly done by PI and poster sessions were by postdocs and graduated students. I attended all of the speaker sessions and among them most impressive talk was done by Dr. Vikaas S. Sohal. He gave a talk on the factors that control the input to individual neurons and/or microcircuit using optogenetics and dynamic clamp in acute brain slices, while quantitatively measuring the output using approaches. There are also other interesting presentations, but I don’t have much space to write all of them.

9/22–9/26 Parnassus campus (Dr. Kriegstein lab)

I met with Dr. Kriegstein and talked with him about my current project. He explained to me couples of his ongoing projects. Then he introduced me to one of postdocs and allowed me to follow his experiment during my stay. Firstly, he showed me around the lab. I followed him to inject retrovirus-GFP to utero and then prepare slice culture to process time-lapse imaging. During my stay, I joined their lab lunch and lab meeting.

9/27 Departure from SFO → 9/28 Arrival in Narita

This retreat of neuroscience program got me a good opportunity to get to know a general background in other areas of neuroscience and related disciplines. Besides, I could discuss with many professors, postdocs and students face to face. I really benefit a lot from this precious experience, not only in terms of new knowledge but also the ability of learning. I greatly appreciate the organizers of this retreat in University of Tokyo, especially professor Tabata and secretary Ms. Asakura and faculty of UCSF, Dr. Kornberg, Dr. Reichardt etc. In addition, I particularly thank my professor Okabe who encouraged me to attend the retreat and visit some labs as well as Kondo sensei who gave some precious advice on my poster. Through this retreat, I realized how interesting and attractive the neuroscience field is and it drives me to work even harder to do my future study. If possible, I do hope I could have chance to attend this next year again.