View ACS Chemical Neuroscience Volume 13 HERE

And read our article about how persistent organic pollutants cause an ALS phenotype in motor neurons HERE

Excited to share our collaborative work with the Bosco group at UMass Chan Medical School, Worchester!  Dan Kulick, BA/MA ’21 is a contributing author.

Congratulations Aidan!! 

Last week Aidan Jones, a senior undergraduate researcher in the lab, was inducted into the Connecticut Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.   (Aidan is first in the back row, left side)

Read Wesleyan’s article HERE.

Our lab’s work, lead by Dan Kulick (BA/MA ’21), will be featured on the cover of ACS Chemical Neuroscience’s special issue on Neurotoxicology!

Title: The ALS-associated persistent organic pollutant cis-chlordane causes GABA<sub>A<\/sub> independent toxicity to motor neurons providing evidence toward an environmental component of sporadic ALS

Authors: Daniel Kulick, Emily Moon, R. Madison Riffe, Gregory Teicher, Simon Van Deursen, Aaron Berson, Wu He, Gloster Aaron, Geraled B. Downes, Stephen Devoto, Alison ONeil

Read the article HERE

WNPR interviewed Prof. O’Neil about the lab’s new Alzheimer’s disease research project.

You can here the radio spot and read the article HERE.

Link to registration HERE

The lab’s first paper exploring pesticides and ALS will be published in ACS Neurochemistry and has been selected to be featured as an ACS Editors’ Choice article!  Article info below:

The ALS-Associated Persistent Organic Pollutant cis-Chlordane Causes GABA_A Independent Toxicity to Motor Neurons Providing Evidence Toward an Environmental Component of Sporadic ALS

 Authors:

Daniel Kulick¹, Emily Moon¹, R. Madison Riffe², Gregory Teicher², Simon Van Deursen³, Aaron Berson⁴, Wu He⁵, Gloster Aaron¹, Gerald B. Downes⁶, Stephen Devoto⁴, Alison O’Neil⁷*

Author Affiliations:

¹ Biology Department, Neuroscience and Behavior Program, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, USA

² Neuroscience and Behavior Graduate Program, Biology Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA

³ Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, USA

⁴ Biology Department, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, USA

⁵ University of Connecticut Flow Cytometry Core, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA, wu.he@uconn.edu

⁶ Neuroscience and Behavior Graduate Program, Molecular and Cellular Biology Graduate Program, Biology Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA, gbdownes@umass.edu

⁷ Chemistry Department, Neuroscience and Behavior Program, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06459, USA, aoneil@weslyan.edu,

We are excited to announce we’ve been awarded a Stephen I. Katz Early Stage Investigator Research Grant through the NIH-NIA to study Alzheimer’s Disease.  This 5-year grant will focus on understanding the cell autonomous and non-cell autonomous effects of amyloid-beta and tau oligomerization. As a model system, we will be differentiating Alzheimer’s patient derived induced pluripotent stem cells into brain organoids.

Sound Interesting? We are actively recruiting a post doctoral fellow and PhD students to work on this.

Some of the O’Neil Lab members got into the Halloween Spirit and survived a super scary,  interactive haunt through the woods of Lyman Orchard in Middletown.

Prof. O’Neil taught a neuroscience module in the 2022 GIS Summer camp in Middletown, CT.

Campers learned about the 4 major lobes of their brain, doing activities to exercise each lobe, and then created a “brain hat” to show off their lobes.

Campers also learned about how our brains are connected to the rest of our body via neurons.  The class built a neuron circuit and tried to send a signal from one side to another as fast as they could.