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TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Optical Approaches in Intact Animals to Study Neuroregeneration

Guest Editors

Gal Haspel

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Department of Biological Sciences

Gal Haspel is a neuroethologist who studies the neurobiology of locomotion, mostly in the nematode C. elegans. He is particularly interested in understanding what makes locomotion behavior resilient to variability and changes in neurons, circuits, and the environment.His BSc degree, in 1996 at the Ben-Gurion University (Israel) was followed by a PhD in Neuroscience and Life Sciences in 2003 at the same university under the mentorship of Frederic Libersat, on the nervous -system-targeting behavior-changing sting of the parasitoid wasp Ampulex compressa and its effect on the motor output of its cockroach prey. During graduate school, he took the Neurobiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where during a 12-hour period he heard a lecture on the emerging technology of genetically encoded calcium indicators from, the now late, Roger Tsien, followed by an introductory lecture about the neurobiology of C. elegans from Anne Hart. Combining the two ideas, Gal began studying the neurobiology of C. elegans during a summer of independent research as a Grass Fellow also at the MBL. Before the word optogenetics was coined, he expressed three opsin-related proteins in nematode neurons and muscle and tested the induced effect of light on behavior. He joined the laboratory of Anne Hart at Harvard Medical School (USA) in 2004, and then the laboratory of Michael O’Donovan at the National Institutes of Health (USA). Since 2013, his laboratory at the New Jersey Institute of Technology studies the connectivity, activity, and recovery from injury of the locomotion circuit in C. elegans and other small creatures, using optical and transgenic technologies and approaches.

Samuel Chung

Northeastern University, Department of Bioengineering

Prof. Samuel Chung obtained his BS in Applied Physics from Caltech in 2000. In Prof. Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard, he pioneered a femtosecond laser surgery technique in the roundworm C. elegans and obtained a PhD in Applied Physics in 2009. He then joined Prof. Christopher Gabel’s group at the Boston University School of Medicine, where he developed devices for fluorescence microscopy and established a novel neuroregeneration model in C. elegans. Prof. Chung joined the Bioengineering Department at Northeastern University in the fall of 2017 and established a multidisciplinary group to develop accessible optical tools for improving imaging and investigating single neurons in the worm. A recent invention from his laboratory is Copli, a cooling stage to immobilize the entire C. elegans populations for microscopy with minimal effort. The goal of his technology development is to fully automate microscopy in a vertically-integrated platform. His laboratory also leverages laser surgery and roundworm genetics to dissect the cellular and molecular mechanisms of lesion conditioning, which allows regeneration in the mammalian central nervous system.

Katherine Thompson-Peer

University of California, Irvine. Department of Developmental and Cell Biology

Dr. Katherine Thompson-Peer earned her BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. For her gap years, she worked in the lab of Alex Kolodkin in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 2003-2005, studying axon guidance in Drosophila and cultured cells.  As a graduate student at Harvard Medical School, she worked with Josh Kaplan at Massachusetts General Hospital to investigate the transcriptional regulation of neuronal development in C. elegans, earning her Ph.D. in 2012. As a postdoctoral fellow with Yuh-Nung and Lily Jan at the University of California, San Francisco, in the department of Physiology and Biophysics, and HHMI, she began to study how neurons in the Drosophila peripheral nervous system respond to dendrite injury. Since April 2019, she has run her own independent group at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology. Using her background as a cellular and developmental neurobiologist with expertise in optical and genetic approaches, her lab investigates the unique features of how neurons respond to and regenerate after dendrite injury. At UCI, she is a fellow of the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, and the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.

Laura Fontenas

Florida Atlantic University. Department of Biological Sciences.

Dr. Laura Fontenas obtained her BS in Biology from the University of Poitiers (France) in 2010, where she discovered a passion for glial cells. She obtained an MS in Neuroscience from Paris-Sud University in 2012, where she established a microarray screen for novel genes regulating Schwann cell development using zebrafish with Dr. Marcel Tawk, a foundation for her graduate work. In the Tawk lab, she showed the important role of neuron-glia interactions in peripheral nerve development and obtained her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Paris-Sud in 2015. In 2016, Dr. Fontenas moved to the US to carry out her postdoctoral research in Dr. Sarah Kucenas’ lab at the University of Virginia, where she characterized a previously unknown type of peripheral glia that originate in the spinal cord, as well as mechanisms that control glial cell migration at the borders of the nervous system. She used a combination of genetic and laser ablation, lineage tracing, genome editing techniques, and in vivo imaging in zebrafish larvae. She started as an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University in Fall 2022, where her lab investigates myelinating glial cell migration and plasticity in the healthy and injured nervous system.