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Speakers, topics and chairs of past dopamine club meetings

2017

March 13th – *Dopamine Club special lecture*

Paul Bolam - "Dopamine neurons: morphology, connections, functional properties and susceptibility in Parkinson's disease"

Chair: Stephanie Cragg

 

2016

June 13th – Understanding dopamine neuron dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease

Ben Hunn (DPAG) - “Macroautophagy, alpha-synuclein, and dopamine neurotransmission”
John Reynolds (Visiting Scientist from University of Otago, New Zealand) - "Dopamine timing and reinforcement. Relevance to dyskinesias in PD?"
Chair: Richard Wade-Martins

 

March 14th – From DA neurons ‘in a dish’ to action initiation

Hugo Ribeiro Fernandes (DPAG) - “Elucidating the role of GBA mutations in Parkinson’s disease using iPSC-derived neurons”
Emilie Syed
(MRC BNDU) - “Action initiation shapes mesolimbic dopamine encoding of future rewards”

Chair: Liz Tunbridge

 

2015

November 30th – Studying dopamine in humans

Sanjay Manohar (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences) - “Reward, dopamine and the cost of control”
Liz Tunbridge (Psychiatry) - “Studying dopamine genes in mouse and man”
Chair: Mark Walton

 

June - In vivo recordings of single DA cell activity

Paul Dodson and Anna Kaufmann from the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit gave us an insightful discussion dopamine neuron firing in vivo, including how burst firing differs from phasic firing, a comparative look at the pitfalls and strengths of this approach and others and what these dopamine firing patterns mean for release and whether and how they might encode movement.
Chair: Katie Jennings

 

March - The promises and pitfalls of fast scan cyclic voltammetry

Offering excellent temporal and spatial resolution, FSCV is a powerful electrochemical method for dopamine measurement that is ideally situated to get at questions that are inaccessible to microdialysis or electrophysiology. But what does the non-voltammetrist need to know about the technique? Two presenters, Katie Jennings (DPAG), and Mark Walton (Exp Psychol), gave a run down of optimal applications of FSCV and its limitations before moving on to discuss why the electrochemical current can be tricky to work with and why it isn't necessarily dopamine. Other topics covered included what FSCV has taught us about how dopamine release relates (or doesn't) to cell firing and the local control mechanisms that exist in the striatum.  
Chair: Stephanie Cragg

 

2014 December 1st - Inaugural meeting

With over forty dopamine researchers attending from sites around the university it was a great success, full of engaged debate and discussion. This was in large part thanks to our two excellent speakers. Scott Waddell (Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, DPAG) brought us up to date with his laboratory's work on the role of dopamine in olfactory conditioning and motivation in drosophila whilst Colin McNamara (Pharmacology) presented his latest paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, detailing how dopaminergic neurons promote hippocampal reactivation and spatial memory.
Chair: Katie Jennings

 

For details of our upcoming meetings, click here.