Student work pays off!
Congratulations to David (Medical Student Research Programme) and Maren, Kaykobad and Yola (8-week BMED320 students)! Their concentrated work resulted in a shared second author position on a new paper from our lab. Congratulations also to first author Jian Hao, an MD/PhD student soon finishing in our lab.
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Even though the BMED320 students were in our lab for only 8 weeks, they worked hard and made substantial contributions to this recently published paper about the distribution of neurons in the retina.
The paper is published open access in the journal Visual Neuroscience.
Liu JH, Peter DO, Guttormsen MSF, Hossain MdK, Gerking Y, Veruki ML, Hartveit E (2022). The mosaic of AII amacrine cell bodies in rat retina is indistinguishable from a random distribution. Visual Neuroscience 39:E004 doi.org/10.1017/S0952523822000025
Our findings suggest that the real distribution of a multifunctional interneuron in the retina (the AII amacrine cell) cannot be discriminated from random distributions matched for density and constrained by soma size. This by itself does not mean that the distribution is inherently random, but points to the importance of how the distribution is generated during development. The real distributions could potentially be generated by a series of mechanisms without an intrinsic ability to establish regularity. For neuronal populations with relatively high density, like that of the AII amacrine, there is no clear need for a mechanism to explicitly establish regularity in the distribution. Future work will be required to decipher the actual mechanisms involved during development