Editorial overview: Cellular Nneuroscience

Dr Hollis T. Cline is the Hahn Professor of Neuroscience, Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla. Dr Cline is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. Dr Cline is a past President of the Society for Neuroscience. After receiving her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the University of California, Berkeley, she did postdoctoral training with Martha Constantine-Paton at Yale and Richard Tsien at Stanford University. The Cline lab used quantitative analysis of in vivo time-lapse images, electrophysiology, including in vivo recordings of visually evoked responses, and visually guided behavior to show that visual stimulation and activity-induced candidate plasticity genes and activity-regulated proteins modify neuronal structure by impinging on synapse stability, and that these effects then ramify to affect visually evoked responses recorded from intact animals, visual information processing and visually guided behavior. Cline proposed a unifying model in which synaptic dynamics iteratively maintain or rearrange neuronal structure and connectivity, suggesting that a range of molecular and cellular mechanisms that affect synapse stability will ultimately impact circuit connectivity and function.

Thomas L. Schwarz is Assistant Director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and is appointed as an Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen. He holds an A.B and Ph.D from Harvard University and was previously on the faculty at Stanford Medical School. Since his postdoctoral work at UCSF on the cloning of the Shaker K+ channel, his lab has combined genetics and cell biology to explore neuronal cell biology. His laboratory has studied mutations that alter the formation and function of synapses, including mutations of synaptic vesicle and cell surface proteins and components of endocytic pathways. They discovered that a2d proteins are required for proper synaptic bouton formation independent of their Ca channel function and recently demonstrated that proteins of the kinetochore complex are repurposed in post-mitotic neurons to influence synapse formation. Another major focus of the laboratory is the axonal transport of mitochondria; they described the motor/adaptor complex that governs that transport and examined the significance of defects in mitochondrial transport for neurodegenerative diseases.