Congratulations to Selena Sullivan, an undergraduate in the laboratory for earning the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award at the University of Utah, School of Medicine for 2021.
Jessica Garcia is this year’s University of Utah Student Veteran of the Year. Jessica is an undergraduate student in the lab exploring the OFF-layer branches of ON cone bipolar cells in early retinal degeneration.
Jessica came to us by way of service with the US Navy, where she served as an aviation technician before attending the University of Utah.
Congratulations Jessica! We are so proud of you.
I am pleased to report that the The Marclab for Connectomics has been funded by the National Science Foundation with a 5 year grant as part of a large, international consortium to study synaptic weighting. We are collaborating with the Erik Jorgensen laboratory here at the University of Utah, and will be exploring synapses in a model of retinal degeneration. There is a nice writeup of the award on the Moran Eye Center website, here.
This is a wonderful opportunity to work with other colleagues that will be funded alongside us with this grant, including Uri Manor @manorlaboratory, Davi Bock @dddavi, Josh Vogelstein @neuro_data, Viren Jain @stardazed0, and others. My thanks to Kristen Harris for heading up this initiative.
Bryan W. Jones and Robert E. Marc and were selected as 2013 FASEB BioArt Winners (Press release here). This image shows a region of an amazingly complex retina from a goldfish (Carassius auratus auratus) analyzed using tools called Computational Molecular Phenotyping (CMP) that reveal the metabolic state of the all cell types in tissues. These cells were labeled with antibodies for the presence of two fundamental amino acid metabolites (anti-glycine in red, anti-GABA in blue) and an amino acid tracer of physiologic activity (anti-AGB in green). These labels allow us to visualize the metabolic state and therefore, classes of bipolar, amacrine and horizontal cells. More details on the image here.