Neuroscience in Portugal? Yes!
The Champalimaud Centre of the Unknown held its first symposium with a very balanced mixture of topics, ranging from theoretical neuroscience to physiology, molecular neuroscience and behaviour - and from annelids, lampreys, flies, mosquitos, mice, rats, monkeys and humans. Birds were missing, but I had at least a poster as well as there were posters on zebrafish, grasshoppers, c. elegans and some other rare model species. What was most impressive? Many good talks, Antonio Damasio, but also Daniel Wolperts and Detlev Arendts talk were inspiring. Gyorgy Buszaki had some data on place cells losing the temporal information under cannabinoids - need to check that in our PPC-EC study. Who knows, maybe we got the reverse, intact time but no place information? And then there was Alcino Silva on memory allocation. Had some fun discussing with him the memorising method of loci. Even have an idea how to test it, so I should contact his colleague. So, yes Champalimaud should be on the radar - great architecture and surely also soon great science popping out.
Monday 26 September 2011
Bees
We had a great idea:
On 24th of June Unal et al. reported that yeast reverse ageing (Science 332) during sporulation. There is a potential case of reverse ageing in an adult animal. When the population of a bee hive gets large enough, the old queen and experienced foragers leave to start a new hive. When the swarm finds a site for a new hive, the queen needs workers that build combs and raise the new brood. These are tasks normally carried out by young workers, but many stayed behind in the old hive with the new queen. Some foragers in the new hive revert to the roles normally reserved for young bees (Gilley 1998). If that were all, the new hive would be in trouble. Worker bees only take on the risky business of foraging towards the end of their normal life span. If they only took on the roles of younger bees, would they live long enough to raise the next set of workers? The problem is solved by these workers extending their life span. The crucial question is whether these bees merely drastically slow or actually reverse the ageing process. If the latter, this would be the only case we know of reverse ageing in an adult multicellular animal. It seems to us this should draw the attention of ageing researchers.
But then it turned out bees in the swarm are of younger age then the ones from the original hive. So we did not submit the comment ...
Still, it was good training.
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