Reading Time: 5 minutes Hi, I’m Ben, a researcher working at Sheffield University. I attended last year’s International Symposium on ALS/MND as one of the Symposium Communication Ambassadors and this is one of the most interesting pieces of work I saw. MND is an incredibly complex disease, with many factors contributing to the death of motor neurons. The way…
Reading Time: 4 minutes My name is Dr Hannah Smith, and I’m a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. My project is supervised by Professor Tom Gillingwater, and my work is funded by MND Scotland. My current research focuses on comparing healthy motor neurons and those with MND/ALS, specifically focusing on early changes to the cellular machinery and how the motor neurons produce the proteins they need to function. I’ll discuss the specifics of that, and why we are interested in finding out this information, in the next section.
Reading Time: 5 minutes My current work focuses on looking at the cell types that are affected in MND and how they impact each other. Motor neurons, the main cell type affected in MND, connect our brains and muscles. This connection is what allows us to move. In MND, these cells start to die, which is what leads to progressive paralysis. But motor neurons aren’t the only cell types affected by MND. They are surrounded by many more cells called glia, which have roles in keeping our motor neurons healthy.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Introduction A genetic change in the C9orf72 gene is the most common genetic cause of motor neurone disease (MND), accounting for 40%-50% of people with familial MND and 5%-10% of people with sporadic MND. This genetic change in C9orf72 can also lead to behavioural symptoms of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), in some people with MND (around…
Reading Time: 6 minutes As part of our Symposium Spotlight series, we’re looking back on some of the research presented at the 32nd International Symposium on ALS/MND. This blog takes a closer look at the Stephen Hawking Memorial Lecture (supported by The Stephen Hawking Foundation) which was presented by Professor Jennifer Doudna, a joint Nobel Prize winner for her…
Reading Time: 7 minutes This is blog number 13 in our ‘Symposium Blogathon’ – counting down to the 32nd International Symposium on ALS/MND. Numbers in bold green type correspond to the code in the abstract book. Click on the number to be redirected to the full abstract (the page may take a minute to load). You can also find…
Reading Time: 2 minutes A team at the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience are creating a zebrafish model to study the C9orf72 gene mutation in MND, and work out its role in the brain and spinal cord (our reference 864-792). Zebrafish are a good way of modelling what happens in human MND. We know that many of the genes…
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you looked at the motor neurones of people with MND down the microscope you would see clumps of a protein called TDP-43. Researchers around the world are working to find why these clumps form and how they are linked to MND. Dr Jemeen Sreedharan has been looking at the effects of TDP-43 in fruit…
Reading Time: 4 minutes Dr Frank Hirth is one of the world’s leading fruit fly MND researchers. Based at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, he has been working on an Association-funded project developing a C9orf72 fruit fly model of MND. Here we mark the end of this project, and report on what the…
Reading Time: 4 minutes MND Association-funded researcher, Prof Linda Greensmith, based at University College London, together with her collaborator Dr Ivo Lieberam from Kings College London, have introduced stem cell-derived motor neurones into mice. Published in the prestigious journal Science on 4 April 2014, her research has also demonstrated that muscle function can be controlled by light. Modelling MND…
