John McManus

PhD student studying neurodegenerative disease at the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, Tasmania, Australia.

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

Neurons are amazing 😍🧠
Axons from primary mouse cortical neurons regrowing following injury.
Each frame represents 15 minutes (total 6 hours).
#cellfie #neuroscience #sciencetwitter #microscopy

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal Unsure about “cooking” nodes. I have just briefly skimmed one paper that showed rats over expressing myelin basic protein in the amygdala and hippocampus had an increased contextual fear learning response - unsure how that manifests at the cellular level though.

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

Neurons are amazing 😍🧠
Axons from primary mouse cortical neurons regrowing following injury.
Each frame represents 15 minutes (total 6 hours).
#cellfie #neuroscience #sciencetwitter #microscopy

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal I’m going to have to do some background reading on the link between pathological myelination and PTSD I think! This is all a bit out of my wheelhouse, sorry Meier! I think targeted approaches to anything are challenging, with current approaches being in their infancy (eg CRISPR)

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@TaggingTabbies SSAF allocation also seems under-utilised at the HDR level. Allocations to mental health services and emergency financial support are great - though only $30,000 was allocated for the latter in 2023 🙃
Also can’t find information on where the $670,000 unspent from last year goes?

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@sciencevs Now I’m wondering if donating plasma would help a hangover or make it worse… 🤔 Can’t remember if there’s a question asking “In the last 24 hours, did you consume a reckless amount of alcohol, attend an afters, or get absolutely mortal in any way otherwise?”

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@sciencevs Become a med student > misappropriate clinic items > hang a banana bag 🙃

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@sciencevs Often recommended the water + ibuprofen before bed remedy - would love to hear more on if and/or why that might actually work!
Also what a hangover is physiologically.

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal I haven’t really read anything regarding clearing myelin that isn’t related to demyelinating diseases/pathology (I.e. anything looking instead at potentially pathological myelin accumulation) - so I would be interested to see research published on this too!

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal Then compare unexpected presence of myelin at nodes with a known pathophysiology (e.g. behaviour, inflammatory markers, etc). Lots of ways to skin it from there. This is of course all after Step 0 - check if it’s been done before, and check if it’s worth doing! 😁 Hope that helps

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal There’s probably protein scaffolding in the axon specific to nodes that you could target - maybe even labelling with a fluorescent tag like GFP. You would need to look at them in tissue rather than culture anyway, as I don’t think nodes form properly in vitro 2/3

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal 😂 thanks!

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal Probably not close enough - you can see myelin sheaths under electron microscopy of myelinated axons in tissue; this is bright field microscopy at x20 magnification, whereas EM for axons is upwards of x4500, even x20,000 for sub cellular details

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal I’d put money on this guy being a microglial cell though - he skedaddles out of frame pretty quickly (each frame of the video is ~15mins). These drag themselves around my cultured neurons, collecting degraded cell bits. They even squeeze through the micro grooves meant for axons!

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

@MeierLowenthal As for the myelin - it’s possible, but I’m not even sure what that would look like in this setting! The culture medium they’re growing in isn’t ideal for oligodendrocytes so my guess would be that they wouldn’t be thriving, though there’s definitely some glial cells present.

[Avraham Z. Cooper, MD 🩺 @AvrahamCooperMD]

Who knew that the Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Complex actually resembles a pub brawl?

#medtwitter #biology

[Jenny Osborne @JLeeOsb]

@wawisloyola In seminars I've recently led, students said they had to prioritise working to pay rent and have money for food, money for Christmas. The gap in student finance has left them struggling. Not the only factor, but a strong one.

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

Premier @jeremyrockliff is ‘sick of’ people arguing against spending money on a new stadium? What’s it going to take for him to be ‘sick of’ failing our healthcare system?
https://t.co/brZkeUY7bA via @themercurycomau

[Gerry McBride @GerryMcBride]

After the early bricks but before smartphones, there was a stretch where phone design went absolutely catshit bananas (1/?)

[John McManus @TwitMcManus]

Day one! Please say hi and show me all of your science 😊
#SfN2022
Ps - thanks for mislabelling my name on the poster FedEx. Sick burn, you guys got me good.