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The highways that Simon Fraser University biologist Michael Silverman studies aren’t found on any Google map. They’re the microscopic transport pathways that allow “goods and services” to travel inside brain cells, called neurons. But it isn’t always a smooth ride.

Silverman and his cellular neuroscience research team are investigating how disruptions along these cellular highways may play a critical role in the development of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The research is funded by a four-year $480,000 grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

“Just as a city depends on the proper function of roads, vehicles, and traffic signals, inside the cell there’s a network of tracks with molecular motor proteins capable of moving cargo essential for life,” explains Silverman.

“Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are very complex disorders, yet one view holds that a crippling of the transport system leads to the deterioration of neurons.”

Silverman’s lab uses sophisticated microscopy techniques to make movies of cargo molecules trafficking inside of living neurons. Then by duplicating disease conditions in the lab’s brain-cell culture model, researchers are able to assess how transport is disrupted.

By understanding the faulty signals caused by Alzheimer’s disease, his team hopes to design strategies to keep cellular cargo on the move and help neurons to stay alive longer.

Silverman is part of a diverse group of academics at SFU – from fields as wide-ranging as biology, psychology, kinesiology, health sciences, and engineering science – whose teaching and research are focused on the field of neuroscience.

SFU researchers recently joined forces to create a new Graduate Certificate in Neuroscience. This certificate will provide a program of study for graduate students as well as new collaborative research opportunities for faculty. The certificate will be offered for the first time this fall. See: www.sfuneuroscience.ca

Backgrounder: Examples of neuroscience research at SFU

• Urs Ribary leads SFU’s new Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Institute and has spent three decades researching functional connectivity in the brain. Ribary supervises the magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain-imaging facility housed at Burnaby’s Down Syndrome Research Foundation, where several SFU researchers are studying brain development and function. SFU’s B.C. Leadership Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience for Children’s Health, he believes the piecing together of a new diagnostic map of the brain is moving closer to reality.
• Anthony Herdman directs the human brain research lab at SFU. He researches the brain functions that underlie psychological phenomena involved in auditory and visual perceptions, attention and memory, and how they develop in children. He studies how a brain communicates across multiple dimensions (space, time and frequency) and how that communication is altered by experience as the brain develops its perceptual and cognitive abilities. www.sfu.ca/brainlab
• Ralph Mistlberger studies sleep and biological rhythms, with an emphasis on the neural basis of circadian, or daily, rhythms. He focuses on circadian “clocks” in the brain that regulate daily rhythms, identifying the circuitry by which behavioral and environmental stimuli alter the timing of these clocks. His earlier research on how brain functions are affected by sleep and circadian disruptions found that 72 hours of partial sleep deprivation can suppress the ongoing production of new neurons in a brain region important for learning and memory.
• Health Sciences assistant professor Takako Niikura looks beyond what currently approved drugs for Alzheimer’s disease do to enhance cognitive function and improve quality of life. She studies the pathological and physiological mechanisms of neuro-degeneration and neuro-protection in aging-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Niikura’s research focuses on a newly found peptide called Humanin, which tests to date show has the capacity promote nerve cell survival in AD.
• Engineering Science professor Faisal Beg and his research team are taking precise measurements of the shape of brain structures from magnetic resonance images to identify the patterns of change that occur with healthy aging compared to those who have Alzheimer's disease. Using these patterns, they are developing methods to assist in the accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's, especially in the early stages.
• Biomedical physiologist Charles Krieger studies how bone marrow-derived cells (BMDCs) in an animal model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, could potentially be involved or used in the treatment of the neurodegenerative disease. A key question is why nerve cells are progressively lost as a result of the fatal disease. His research focuses on the role BMDCs could play in increasing neuronal survival.
• Biologist Harald Hutter’s lab is investigating how neural circuits form in the embryo. To learn more about how neurons get wired, his research team is studying the genes of tiny worms known as C. elegans. “A fundamental understanding at the molecular level of how the brain gets wired has implications for a growing number of neurological conditions in humans,” he says.
  
  

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