Edward Hubbard, PhD – Slide of the Week

Approximately 1 in 20 people experience a kind of “mixing of the senses”, known as synesthesia. In the type of synesthesia we are investigating here, “grapheme‐color synesthesia” letters and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes) automatically and involuntarily elicit color experiences (top section). This type of synesthesia affects approximately 1% of the population.

Randy Ashton, PhD – Slide of the Week

Transplantation of human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived neurons into chick embryos is an established preliminary assay to evaluate engraftment potential. Yet, with recent advances in deriving diverse human neuronal subtypes, optimizing and standardizing such transplantation methodology for specific subtypes at their correlated anatomical sites is still required.

Bradley Christian, PhD – Slide of the Week

Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome; DS) leads to an overproduction of amyloid precursor protein and an increased risk for early Alzheimer’s disease. A study of the natural history of AD-related neuropathology is ongoing to gain an understanding of the distribution and time course of b-amyloid and tau burden in the brains of adults with DS.

Sriram Boothalingam, PhD – Slide of the Week

The auditory efferent system (ES) originates in the auditory cortex and terminates in the cochlea (inner ear). The activity of the ES has several hypothesized implications for human hearing: facilitating speech understanding in noisy environments, protecting the sensitive inner ear against loud noise, and serving as biological markers of damage in the auditory system.