dianalxie

I am a humble research assistant, currently applying to grad school to become a PhD student. I just received my undergraduate degree and am taking a gap year to work on my research and NEURO.tv.

From molecular and cellular biology - how proteins and neurons work - to how brains interact, model the environment and each other to handle social interactions.

Hi, 1) Schizophrenia does begin to manifest much more often during teenage years and early adulthood. Scientists have found genetic and environmental causes that are associated with higher risks for schizophrenia, but the particular reason why it appears during this stage of development are still unknown. Obviously, many physiological changes occur during those years so it is likely that concomitant changes in hormones, brain development or other biological factors might interact with the known causes of schizophrenia to induce the psychotic episodes.

2) There are known changes happening to the brain in schizophrenia. van Os and Kapur ( http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(09)60995-8/fulltext ) note some of the areas that have been known to show anatomical differences. One notable change is in dopaminergic transmission. There is even a hypothesis that increased dopaminergic signalling might be the source of the psychotic episodes in schizophrenia, although it remains an open question whether dopaminergic transmission is simply modified by the psychosis or if it's really the underlying cause ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_hypothesis_of_schizophrenia )

I think the work of Kay Tye at MIT is amazing. She is trying to identify the neural circuits that are involved in mood disorders, anxiety and depression. They target neurons in some brain areas that are equipped with light receptors that have been introduced genetically, and then with a very intense light pointed at the brain they are able to shut down or activate these neurons to see if they are involved in mood disorders.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v496/n7444/full/nature12018.html

Well I'm very used to considering the safety and well-being of subjects in experiments so in all honesty, I have never thought about it before!

For the show, yes I will be a co-host with JF!

The format will depend a lot on how much money we raise. Visually, we'd love it to look like the Huffington Post Live, but with neuroscientists, with 1-hour long, in-depth discussions.

The themes will be different every episodes, and therefore complementary. But we won't go for the "topics du jour" in the sense of closely following the discovery every week. We are looking at providing in-depth looks at a particular subject every month.

I think it would be nice to have a chat room in parallel that could guide the host. For disclosing of information on current research, this is specific to every field. In some fields within neuroscience, you can talk about it as much as you want, you are the only person in the world interested in your subjects. In other fields where hundreds of laboratories are after the same questions (like long-term potentiation research in the hippocampus), you want to keep current research secret until it gets published.