On May 6th, 2009, Prof. Yong-Xiang Lu, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, sent a letter to Prof. Mu-Ming Poo congratulating him on becoming a member of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
On May 6, 2009, the Journal of Neuroscience published a research article from ION entitled "Entrainment of Slow Oscillations of Auditory Thalamic Neurons by Repetitive Sound Stimuli”. This work was carried out by Li-xia Gao, Xian-kai Meng, Chang-quan Ye Chun Xu and other graduate students from the laboratories of Drs. Xiao-hui Zhang and Mu-ming Poo at ION as well as the laboratory of Professor Ju-fang He at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
On April 28th, the First Council Meeting of the Hsiang-Tung Chang Foundation was held at ION. The meeting was chaired by Prof. Mu-Ming Poo, and all the other council members including Prof. Chien-Ping Wu, Prof. Yi-Zhang Chen, Prof. Shu-Min Duan, Prof. Zhi-Qi Zhao, Mrs. Shu-Fang He and Mrs. Shu-Min Zhang attended the meeting.
A research paper entitled “Ventral Mesencephalon-Enriched Genes that Regulate the Development of Dopaminergic Neurons in Vivo” from Dr. Jiawei Zhou’s laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience was published in the Journal of Neuroscience on April 22, 2009. In this paper, the authors illustrated genetic pathways that control mesodiencephalic dopaminergic (mDA) neuron differentiation during development.
On April 11, 2009 Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), NIH, USA visited ION. Accompanying him were Dr. Richard Nakamura, Scientific Director of NIMH and Dr. Bai Lu, Associate Director of Molecular Neurobiology, GCAP, NIMH. They met with ION faculty members in the morning, introducing the institutes to each other and exchanging ideas about future collaborations.
Dr. Xiao-Bing Yuan was invited to attend the Neurochemistry Winter Conference held in Solden, Austria on March 31st to April 4th. During the conference, Dr. Yuan gave an invited talk entitled "Guidance of cortical radial migration by gradients of diffusible factors".
A symposium on molecular neuroscience was held at the Institute of Neuroscience on March 26th, 2009. During the symposium, Dr. Aaron Hsueh from Stanford University, Dr. Zhi-Gang He from Harvard University, Drs. Guo-Ping Feng and Fan Wang from Duke University, Dr. Qiang Sun from East China Normal University, Drs. Mu-Ming Poo, Shu-Min Duan, Tian-Le Xu, Zhen-Ge Luo and Zhi-Qi Xiong from ION presented their recent works.
Institute of Neuroscience (ION) and the Shanghai Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) invited Prof. Kozo Kaibuchi from the Department of Cell Pharmacology at Nagoya University in Japan to visit ION on March 20, 2009. During his stay, Prof. Kaibuchi visited several ION laboratories, had lunch with some ION students and gave a talk entitled "Axon formation and polarized transport". More than one hundred researchers attended the lecture.
Dr. Shu-Min Duan was invited to attend the Gordon Research Conference on "Glial biology: functional interactions among glia and neurons" held in Ventura, California, USA on March 15th to 20th. During the conference, Dr. Duan gave an invited talk entitled "Astrocytes Release ATP from Lysosomes in a Regulated Fashion".
Jointly supervised by Dr. Mu-ming Poo and Dr. Shu-min Duan, Ai-hong Song and others found that an ankyrin G- and F-actin-dependent structure emerges in the cytoplasm of the axon initial segment (AIS) within 2 days of axonal / dendritic differentiation, imposing a selective filter for diffusion of macromolecules and for transport of vesicular carriers into the axon.
Published in the February 25th issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, work from the Laboratory of Neurobiology of Disease, reported that the CREB co-activator TORC1 regulates activity-dependent CREB–target gene transcription and dendritic growth in developing cortical neurons.
In the January 15th issue of Neuron, work from the Laboratory of Dendritic Development and Neural Circuit Formation, mainly carried out by graduate students Yi-Rong Peng and Shan He under the supervision of Dr. Xiang Yu, in collaboration with the Professor Robert Malenka at Stanford University, identified coordinated and inversely correlated changes in dendritic morphology and unitary excitatory synaptic strength (mEPSC amplitude) following increased neural activity.
Regular ION affairs are administered by committees composed of and chaired by ION faculty members. The functions and members of 2009 are detailed below.
The symposium on "Scientific Education in Primary and Middle Schools" was held in Shanghai on January 10, 2009. It was sponsored by the Education and Science Society (ESS), Institute of Neuroscience (ION), Shanghai Institute of Educational Science and Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences.
During January 5-7, the 2008 Symposium on "Frontier of Cellular Neurobiology" was held at Sanya, Hainan Province. It was sponsored by the Institute of Neuroscience, State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience and the Cellular Neurobiology Section of the Chinese Society for Cell Biology.
