Neuroclub 2025 Seminar 5

A Leeds Neuroscience Research monthly seminar series to showcase and discuss the exciting research generated across our community

Supported by the British Neuroscience Association

Alongside pizzas, this week we have:

Shihab Shah: "Elucidating inflammatory pain mechanisms in sensory neurons"

Understanding the mechanisms underlying inflammatory pain is crucial for developing new, more effective analgesics. Current therapies often fall short, either lacking sufficient efficacy or causing side effects that limit their clinical utility. One promising area of research lies in the endoplasmic reticulum–plasma membrane (ER-PM) junctions, which act as key platforms for the assembly of multiprotein complexes in sensory neurons and play a pivotal role in inflammatory signalling.
Targeting the proteins that form and maintain these ER-PM junctions presents a novel therapeutic strategy. Disrupting these protein interactions may hinder the formation of inflammatory signalling complexes. In our previous work, we identified Junctophilin-4 as a critical scaffolding protein required for store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE)- a pathway essential for Ca2+ signalling in inflammatory processes.
We are currently investigating Extended Synaptotagmin-1 (Esyt1), a Ca2+-sensitive scaffolding protein also involved in forming ER-PM junctions. Given its role in Ca2+ dynamics and membrane tethering, Esyt1 represents a promising target for modulating inflammatory responses at the cellular level.

Rene Frank: “Of mice and men: seeing inside the brain using new methods and equipment at Leeds”

Our group specialises in structural neuroscience methods that enable navigation across length scales within fresh, anatomically intact brain tissue - from subnanometer-resolution protein structure to subcellular architecture, and 3D cellular morphology within mouse and human brain.  Our current focus is on how synapses encode memories and diseases in which memories are lost, including Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. I will present our current progress and future plans. I will also present general methodological pipelines that I hope could be broadly applicable to a wide variety of fundamental neuroscience and neurological diseases.