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Three members of Derek Bowie's lab have received awards; Michael Accardi received a Gelder-Savoy Studentship, Brent Dawe received a 3-year NSERC doctoral award and Dr. Bryan Daniels received a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship from CIHR and the Fragile X Research Foundation of Canada (FXRFC)
Medical students Emily Reynan and Daniel Gottesman, have won, respectively, the Charles E. Frosst Medical Prize and the Mark Nickerson Prize. Info on prizes
Ankkush Madaan, a PhD student in the lab of Sylvain Chemtob, won a best presenter award at the Annual Research day for the School of Optometry at Université de Montréal.
David Verbich, a PhD student in the lab of Anne McKinney, has been chosen as a recipient of the Faculty of Medicine's McGill MedStar Award in recognition of his publication in Glia
Beata Bak, a PhD student in Dan Bernard's lab, has won a McGill MedStar Award for the excellent research that led to her Nature Genetics paper (see below).
Dan Bernard and PhD student Beata Bak have had a paper accepted by Nature Genetics, and it is now published.
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Pawlowski SA, Gaillard S, Ghorayeb I, Ribeiro-da-Silva A, Schlichter R and Cordero-Erausquin M
A novel population of cholinergic neurons in the macaque spinal dorsal horn of potential clinical relevance for pain therapy
Journal of Neuroscience. 2013 Feb 27;33(9):3727-3737
Endogenous acetylcholine (ACh) is a well-known modulator of nociceptive transmission in the spinal cord of rodents. It arises mainly from a sparse population of cholinergic interneurons located in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. This population was thought to be absent from the spinal cord of monkey, what might suggest that spinal ACh would not be a relevant clinical target for pain therapy. In humans, however, pain responses can be modulated by spinal ACh, as evidenced by the increasingly used analgesic procedure (for postoperative and labor patients) consisting in the epidural injection of the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor neostigmine. The source and target of this ACh remains yet to be elucidated. In this study, we used an immunolabeling for choline acetyltransferase to demonstrate for the first time the presence of a plexus of cholinergic fibers in laminae II-III of the dorsal horn of the macaque monkey. Moreover, we show the presence of numerous cholinergic cell bodies within the same laminae and compared their density and morphological properties to those previously described in rodents. An electron microscopy analysis demonstrates that cholinergic boutons are presynaptic to dorsal horn neurons as well as to the terminals of sensory primary afferents, suggesting that they are likely to modulate incoming somatosensory information. Our data suggests that this newly-identified dorsal horn cholinergic system in monkeys is the source of the ACh involved in the analgesic effects of epidural neostigmine, and could be more specifically targeted for novel therapeutic strategies for pain management in humans.
ChAT (to identify cholinergic cells) immunostaining in transverse sections (A) of monkey lumbar spinal cord and high-magnification parasagittal view of ChAT labeling in neuronal cell bodies (B). C, Graphic representation of the Relative Optical Density (ROD) of anti-ChAT immunolabeling in the dorsal horn of monkey. ROD was measured within a rectangle placed with one of the shorter sides at the dorsal limit of the dorsal gray matter and centered in the mediolateral axis of the dorsal horn. The ROD values (obtained along a line parallel to the shorter axis of the rectangle) were exported for every pixel along the dorsoventral axis. D, In a parasagittal section of cervical spinal cord, we used Vesicular Acetylcholine Transporter (VAChT) immunoreactivity to identify cholinergic terminals at the EM level. Observe a VAChT-Immunoreactive bouton (IR) (B) establishing a symmetric synapse with a dendrite (D) and apposed to an astrocytic process (G). E, The central boutons of Type I glomeruli (CI) are postsynaptic to VAChT-IR profiles and are also in apposition with unlabeled boutons displaying pleomorphic synaptic vesicles (V); the VAChT-IR profiles also contact glomerular dendrites (D). LI, lamina I; LIIo, outer lamina II; LIIi, inner lamina II; LIII, lamina III; LIV, lamina IV.
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