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Phd - Neural circuit mechanisms of adaptation or sensitisation to neonicotinoid insecticides.

Employer
Global Academy Jobs
Location
United Kingdom
Closing date
Dec 2, 2016

Job Details

Details

"“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – or does stress make you weaker? This PhD project addresses this question in the context of neuronal synaptic plasticity and insecticides. Many insecticides affect the nervous system and cause insects to behave strangely even at low doses, which is a major problem for honeybees and other insect pollinators harmed by agricultural pesticides.

Yet the nervous system is remarkably plastic and resilient to changes in activity levels. We recently identified an olfactory circuit in the fruit fly Drosophila that compensates for imbalances in excitatory and inhibitory input, a process known as homeostatic plasticity that is conserved from insects to humans. This project will take advantage of the powerful genetic toolkit of Drosophila to study whether insect nervous systems can compensate for insecticides that increase synaptic excitation (i.e., ’adaptation’). Compensation isn’t always helpful though; recent hypotheses about episodic or developmental disorders like epilepsy and autism posit that compensation for one problem may render the nervous system more fragile for other stressors. Therefore, this project also asks whether compensating for sublethal doses of insecticide harms the nervous system in other ways (’sensitisation’).

In this project, the student will use a range of cutting-edge techniques, including multiphoton imaging, electrophysiology, computational modelling, and olfactory memory assays. We anticipate this work will improve our understanding of both insecticide sensitivity/resistance in particular and, more generally, resilience and fragility to perturbations in all nervous systems, including our own."

Funding Notes

Eligibility subject to residence requirement - see http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/documents/studentship-eligibility-pdf/ for full eligibility rules. Non-UK EU students qualify for a 'fees only' award.

References

"References:
About the model system:
Lin AC, Bygrave AM, de Calignon A, Lee T, Miesenböck G. (2014). Sparse, decorrelated odor coding in the mushroom body enhances learned odor discrimination. Nature Neuroscience, 17, 559-68.
Review about homeostatic plasticity:
Davis GW. (2013). Homeostatic signaling and the stabilization of neural function. Neuron 80, 718–728.
About neonicotinoid insecticides:
Palmer MJ, Moffat C, Saranzewa N, Harvey J, Wright GA, Connolly CN. (2013). Cholinergic pesticides cause mushroom body neuronal inactivation in honeybees. Nature Communications 4, 1634.

web: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/bms/research/lin
http://www.aclinlab.org
email: andrew.lin@sheffield.ac.uk"

Company

Global Academy Jobs works with over 250 universities worldwide to promote academic mobility and international research collaboration. Global problems need international solutions. Our jobs board and emails reach the academics and researchers who can help.

"The globalisation of higher education continues apace, driving in turn the ongoing development of the global knowledge economy, striving for solutions to the world’s problems and educating a next generation of leaders and contributors."

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