Integrated Calendar

TBA

The analysis of spatial cells in the hippocampus and the medial entorhinal cortex has been a remarkable success story. Extracellular recordings have revealed astonishing functional abstractness in how single neurons encode concepts such as a place, direction, borders and grids. Though we know a great deal about these functional phenotypes of neuronal activation, information about their underlying microcircuits is sorely lacking. In this talk I will explore the structural underpinnings of this functional specificity in the superficial layers of the medial entorhinal cortex and what the components and architecture of the microcircuits involved in this reveal across evolution and development.

Proteasomes are large intracellular complexes degrading proteins. The major complex is the 26S particle that is formed by association of the 20S catalytic particle with one or two 19S regulatory complex (RC). We show that high levels of 26S proteasome diagnoses cancer cells and Ras transformed cell lines. The increase in the 26S level is uncoupled from rate of cells proliferation. Remarkably shRNA designed to reduce the 19S RC levels proved eἀective in killing the tumor but not the normal cells. The more the tumor cell lines are aggressive the better are killed. We propose to target the 19S RC as a therapeutic strategy of the aggressive tumors.

Can 13C-direct detection experiments be more sensitive than their 1H detected counterparts? We show one such example focusing on the impact of t1-noise and the ways to reduce it or avoid it altogether. The applications include so far difficult measurements of 15N-13C couplings at the natural isotopic abundance [1].
NMR experiments involving multiple receivers provide a unique way of increasing the sensitivity and information content of data recorded in a given period of time [2-4]. We present a comprehensive series of such experiments designed for simultaneous detection of abundant nuclei, such as 1H, 19F and 31P, as well as samples enriched with magnetically active isotopes including 13C and 15N. The multiple receiver experiments are categorized into three main types – (a) parallel acquisition, (b) sequential acquisition and (c) interleaved experiments. The optimum implementation is shown to depend on the relaxation properties of the involved nuclei as well as the intrinsic sensitivity of the directly observed nuclei.
Many of these experiments are amenable to further reduction of experiment time by combining them with other fast NMR techniques, such as Hadamard NMR, non-uniform sampling, spatial encoding or rapid pulsing methods. We believe that the multi-receiver technology will boost the development of new NMR experiments as well as NMR research in general, making the NMR instruments more efficient and making the NMR spectroscopy even more unique in the universe of analytical tools and experimental techniques.