Cellular and Molecular Anatomy of the Human Neuromuscular Junction.

The neuromuscular junction (NMJ) plays a fundamental role in transferring information from lower motor neuron to skeletal muscle to generate movement. It is also an experimentally accessible model synapse routinely studied in animal models to explore fundamental aspects of synaptic form and function. Here, we combined morphological techniques, super-resolution imaging, and proteomic profiling to reveal the detailed cellular and molecular architecture of the human NMJ.

NMJ-morph reveals principal components of synaptic morphology influencing structure-function relationships at the neuromuscular junction.

The ability to form synapses is one of the fundamental properties required by the mammalian nervous system to generate network connectivity. Structural and functional diversity among synaptic populations is a key hallmark of network diversity, and yet we know comparatively little about the morphological principles that govern variability in the size, shape and strength of synapses. Using the mouse neuromuscular junction (NMJ) as an experimentally accessible model synapse, we report on the development of a robust, standardized methodology to facilitate comparative morphometric analysis of synapses ('NMJ-morph').

PeerWise provides significant academic benefits to biological science students across diverse learning tasks, but with minimal instructor intervention.

We demonstrate that student engagement with PeerWise, an online tool that allows students to author and answer multiple-choice questions (MCQs), is associated with enhanced academic performance across diverse assessment types on a second year Genetics course. Benefits were consistent over three course deliveries, with differential benefits bestowed on groups of different prior ability. A rating scheme, to assess the educational quality of students' questions, is presented and demonstrates that our students are able intuitively to make such quality assessments, and that the process of authoring high quality questions alone does not explain the academic benefits.

A systematic analysis of Acanthamoeba genotype frequency correlated with source and pathogenicity: T4 is confirmed as a pathogen-rich genotype.

Acanthamoeba is a genus of facultative human parasites that is currently classified into 17 genotypes (T1-T17) each of which arguably represents a species. These amoebae cause Acanthamoeba Keratitis (AK) a disease of the eye, and a rare but usually fatal Granulatomous Acanthamoeba Encephalitis (GAE). A database of strains derived from the literature and a number of fresh isolates has been constructed to detect trends of pathogenic and other associations with these genotypes.