Thibaud Dieudonné has started in a postdoc position in Poul Nissen’s research group from March 2nd, 2020 to work on cryo-EM and biochemical studies of P4-ATPase lipid flippases. Thibaud will investigate the basis for lipid selectivity and the mechanism of lipid flippase activity of ATP8B1 that maintains asymmetric distributions of lipids across biomembranes in e.g. hepatocytes. ATP8B1 is affected by disease-causing mutations, post-translational modifications and regulatory elements. Thibaud will furthermore investigate how these basic mechanisms can be exploited in molecular medicine.

Mikkel Juul Thomsen started as laboratory technician trainee in group leader Poul Nissen’s lab in February 2020, where we will be supervised by Tanja Klymchuk and Anna Marie Nielsen for the next year. He will be trained in laboratory tasks both with Poul Nissen’s group, as well as in team leader Magnus Kjærgaard’s and Bjørn Pedersen’s (MBG Assoc. prof.) groups.

Chihiro Nakamoto has joined Dr. Tomonori Takeuchi laboratory as a postdoc since April 2019. Dr. Takeuchi discovered that projections from the noradrenergic locus coeruleus into the hippocampus promote novelty-induced memory enhancement through the non-canonical release of dopamine. To directly detect dopamine release from axons of the locus coeruleus in the hippocampus, she has developed novel dopamine biosensor at Dr. Aoki’s Laboratory in Japan from April 2019 to February 2020. In Arhus, she will try to establish a modified version of schema task, flavour-place paired-associate learning, which is currently the only rodent behavioral task that allows us to investigate the mechanisms responsible for the incorporation of new memories into relevant schemas. The establishment of a reliable new schema task in rats will accelerate the discovery of knowledge-updating mechanisms.

A new publication from the Vægter lab with former PhD student from the lab, Sara Jager, as first author unravels how injury of peripheral nerves induce significant changes in the transcriptional profile of their tightly associated Satellite Glial Cells (SGCs).

The new study, published this week in Nature Communications, was led by the neural circuitry team at DANDRITE. The researchers’ findings are important for understanding the mechanisms on how visual perceptions arise within the brain. In this article, first author of the paper, PhD-student at DANDRITE Rune Nguyen Rasmussen, sheds a light on their new findings and its significance for understanding the visual system.