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By Amanda Rose Martinez

A Wednesday morning in Loeb Laboratory found the 2011 Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics & Survival (SPINES) students getting a lesson on the human brain. There to lead the cerebral tour was SPINES faculty member, Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, a neurosurgeon, world expert on brain tumors and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Quiñones-Hinojosa described each brain region, all the while weaving in stories of their function and the history of their discovery. His pace was swift and rich with information, alive with his enduring fascination for what he calls “the most beautiful organ.” As he went, Quiñones-Hinojosa fired off questions to SPINES’ neuroscientists-in-training, compelling them to keep up.

“So where is memory formation?” Quiñones-Hinojosa asked. “Memory formation is right here in the hippocampus. So you can take one hippocampus out. What happens if you take them both out? No new memories. You can have the old memories, but no new ones.”

“You can barely see the curve right here,” he continued, tracing his way through the limbic system to a small, almond-shaped region called the amygdala. “That’s how movies play with us. They show you the movie “Silence of the Lambs” and they make you afraid. They make you feel fear for your life. They’re right here. They’re playing to the amygdala.”

At one point, Quiñones-Hinojosa paused to address the moment’s larger significance: “I get to touch human brains and human lives,” he said. “Not only do I give people hope in the operating room, but outside of the operating room, I get to do research. And I give them hope that one day we’ll find a cure for brain cancer. And then I come here and hang out with you guys. I mean this is the coolest thing I could do in the world.”

On Friday, July 8, Quiñones-Hinojosa will give a lecture entitled: “Bridging the Gap in the Fight Against Cancer: From the Operating Room to the Laboratory,” as part of the Friday Evening Lecture Series. The event will take place in Lillie Auditorium at 8:00 p.m. For more information, visit: http://www.mbl.edu/events/events_friday_07_08_11.html. Quiñones-Hinojosa’s lecture is supported by the Joe L. Martinez, Jr. and James G. Townsel Endowed Lectureship.

Keith Trujillo, co-director of SPINES, with students during a class led by Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa. Photo by Tom Kleindinst

By Amanda Rose Martinez

Students in this year’s Embryology course have just six weeks to wrap their heads around a, if not the, fundamental question of biology: How do you start with a single egg and get to a full embryo? As it turns out, explained Nicole King in Tuesday’s lecture on “Animal Origins,” this is also a fundamental question of evolutionary biology: How did multicellular animals evolve from their single-celled ancestors?

“Our goal,” said King, an associate professor of genetics, genomics, and development from the University of California, Berkeley, “is to try and identify genomic and cell biological innovations that might have contributed to this transition.” She then unveiled the two key players that may prove pivotal in helping scientists to uncover such innovations— choanoflagellates and sponges.

Choanoflagellate: evolution's last stop on the way to animals. Photo by Mark Davel

Choanoflagellates have a spherical cell body, bordered at its crown by a collar of minute, hair-like projections, and a long, central appendage called a flagellum that resembles a whip and enables it to swim. King’s allowance that “it’s reasonable to think of these organisms as sperm cells with a collar,” sent a ripple of early-morning snickers through the auditorium. But what’s special about the unicellular choanoflagellates is that they’re the closest living relatives of animals. Just next to the choanoflagellates on an evolutionary chart lies the multicellular sponges, the earliest branching lineage of animals.

A sponge named Oscarella carmela. Photo by Scott Nichols

In this way, choanoflagellates and sponges “bracket the evolution of multicellularity,” said King. “If we can study these organisms at the molecular level, see what they share in common, see what’s different, hopefully someday, we’ll be able to reconstruct the molecular processes that contributed to the origin of animals.”

Later in the Lab…

Tuesday afternoon, the students got their first glimpse of choanoflagellate and sponge cells. Using a standard imaging technique, they added a fluorescent antibody to a structural protein (beta-tubulin) that is common to both organisms. When viewed under a microscope, the antibodies could be seen fluorescing bright green, which served to highlight the outline of each cell body and flagellum, but also emphasized the shared architecture between choanoflagellate and sponge cells.

“The hope is that these students have interests that are unique and eclectic, and that they’ll take these techniques and apply them in novel ways for their areas of interest,” said Stephen Fairclough, a graduate student in King’s lab at UC Berkeley and one of the teaching assistants for this year’s course.

Yi-Ju Chen (R) of Caltech gets advice on sample preparation from Embryology faculty member Nicole King (L). Photo by Amanda R. Martinez

Eclectic interests indeed. A quick canvas of the room revealed Yi-Ju Chen, a graduate student in physics from Caltech interested in evolutionary theory and pattern formation; Valerie Virta, a postdoc at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who is investigating the mechanism that causes some cells to stop moving and become the bones that form the face; and Joseph Campanale, a PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who studies how embryos eliminate or detoxify environmental chemicals during development.

Joseph Campanale of Scripps readies a piece of sponge for viewing under a microscope. Photo by Amanda R. Martinez

Valerie Virta of NICHD prepares humidification chambers for her samples. Photo by Amanda R. Martinez

By Amanda Rose Martinez

The Neural Systems and Behavior course (NS&B) was already humming with activity last week as it prepared to kick off its 33^rd year. Setting up equipment in Loeb Laboratory on Wednesday was a group of the course’s seasoned regulars, including faculty Lidia Szczupak and Ron Calabrese and teaching assistant Michael Wright.

His eyes glued to a small, circular level, Wright, who is in his fourth year with the course, meticulously adjusted the legs of what could be called the pièce de résistance of the NS&B’s lab equipment: the floating air table.

Michael Wright (L) of Emory University and Herb Luther of MBL Education precision the alignment of an air table in the NS&B lab. Photo by Amanda Martinez

“Very minute vibrations on a preparation that has two electrodes on neurons can just be the end of the experiment,” says Szczupak, who is from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is marking her 11^th summer with NS&B.

Photo by Amanda Martinez

To create a flawlessly stable surface, each table is covered with a metal plate that rests on top of a pocket of air. Everything—microscopes, cells, electrodes, micromanipulators—is affixed to the plate through a series of metal holes on its surface. This way, any vibrations from the footsteps of people walking around or a slammed door are evenly distributed throughout the sensitive experiment’s components.

Come 9 AM Monday this week, 20 students from around the world began the first of four two-week cycles, each of which explores the neural system of a different animal. First up is the leech, which, with its simple nervous system and neurons that are easily recognized with a microscope, is an ideal starting organism.

Lidia Szczupak. Photo by Amanda Martinez

“The goal is to get the kids to approach live neurons with their own hands,” says Szczupak. Come back in two days, she says, and “you’ll see people who never worked with a single neuron before. They’ll be familiar with putting electrodes in the cells, recording resting potential, action potential, and learning what this means.”

If there’s one event in this cycle that NS&B faculty are eagerly anticipating, it’s an appearance by John Nicholls, “one of the ‘Fathers of the Leech,’ ” as Szczupak calls him. Nicholls, formerly of SISSA in Italy and lately teaching in countries around the world, will give a talk on the significance of the leech in neurophysiology research. No stranger to NS&B, Nicholls can be identified among the instructors in the course’s earliest class photos, which are posted in the hall outside the lab.

John Nicholls is 3rd row, 2nd from right (sleeves rolled up) in the 1979 NS&B class photo.

But when asked what they’re most looking forward to and consequently, the thing that keeps them coming back year after year, NS&B faculty unanimously cited two things—camaraderie and friendships, old and new. “It’s just a lot of fun,” says Ron Calabrese of Emory University, who joined the course as a TA in 1979 and has been back every year since. “I like meeting people. I like seeing what they’re about.”

“We’ve been on the same team with minor differences for ten years,” Szczupak says. “We became friends and it’s very nice to be together doing this.”