Pten inhibition dedifferentiates long-distance axon-regenerating intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells and upregulates mitochondria-associated Dynlt1a and Lars2.

Central nervous system projection neurons fail to spontaneously regenerate injured axons. Targeting developmentally regulated genes in order to reactivate embryonic intrinsic axon growth capacity or targeting pro-growth tumor suppressor genes such as Pten promotes long-distance axon regeneration in only a small subset of injured retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), despite many RGCs regenerating short-distance axons. A recent study identified αRGCs as the primary type that regenerates short-distance axons in response to Pten inhibition, but the rare types which regenerate long-distance axons, and cellular features that enable such response, remained unknown. Here, we used a new method for capturing specifically the rare long-distance axon-regenerating RGCs, and also compared their transcriptomes with embryonic RGCs, in order to answer these questions. We found the existence of adult non-α intrinsically photosensitive M1 RGC subtypes that retained features of embryonic cell state, and showed that these subtypes partially dedifferentiated towards an embryonic state and regenerated long-distance axons in response to Pten inhibition. We also identified Pten inhibition-upregulated mitochondria-associated genes, Dynlt1a and Lars2, which promote axon regeneration on their own, and thus present novel therapeutic targets

Project Brainstorm: Using Neuroscience to Connect College Students with Local Schools

Neuroscience can be used as a tool to inspire an interest in science in school children as well as to provide teaching experience to college students

Making effective use of healthcare data using data-to-text technology

Healthcare organizations are in a continuous effort to improve health outcomes, reduce costs and enhance patient experience of care. Data is essential to measure and help achieving these improvements in healthcare delivery. Consequently, a data influx from various clinical, financial and operational sources is now overtaking healthcare organizations and their patients. The effective use of this data, however, is a major challenge. Clearly, text is an important medium to make data accessible. Financial reports are produced to assess healthcare organizations on some key performance indicators to steer their healthcare delivery. Similarly, at a clinical level, data on patient status is conveyed by means of textual descriptions to facilitate patient review, shift handover and care transitions. Likewise, patients are informed about data on their health status and treatments via text, in the form of reports or via ehealth platforms by their doctors. Unfortunately, such text is the outcome of a highly labour-intensive process if it is done by healthcare professionals. It is also prone to incompleteness, subjectivity and hard to scale up to different domains, wider audiences and varying communication purposes. Data-to-text is a recent breakthrough technology in artificial intelligence which automatically generates natural language in the form of text or speech from data. This chapter provides a survey of data-to-text technology, with a focus on how it can be deployed in a healthcare setting. It will (1) give an up-to-date synthesis of data-to-text approaches, (2) give a categorized overview of use cases in healthcare, (3) seek to make a strong case for evaluating and implementing data-to-text in a healthcare setting, and (4) highlight recent research challenges.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, book chapte

Phrase-final words in Greek storytelling speech: a study on the effect of a culturally-specific prosodic feature on short-term memory

Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memoryrelated processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening, which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody. Number of syllables in target words did not reveal substantial difference in performance. The current study presents a previously undocumented culturally-specific prosodic pattern and its effect on short-term memory

Bleeding Eden - A Poetry Reading

This reading aims to address multi-layer threats posed against queer existence and against environment. Beginning in summer 2022 as the work of my Eckley endowment, this project is an ongoing multi-form modern poetic sequence, combining confessional and documentary styles, on the topic of queerness and restoration ecology. The self-endangerment I experience by identifying as transgender in a cis-normative society and the devastation of natural ecosystems are comparable for their proposed treatments: queerness and ecological restoration both depend on and mutually enable community organization. In respect to the interdisciplinary fluidity of environmentalist work and the transformative potential of a queer project, the poetry takes a multi-genre form. While reflecting on and confessing to my interior status of self---considering family and my upbringing as essential to my queerness---I document exterior changes in my personhood and in modern environmental issues. I do this as a student of environmental studies, and as a transgender person receiving gender-affirming testosterone injections