Neuropil is any area in the nervous system composed of mostly unmyelinated axons, dendrites and glial cell processes that forms a synaptically dense region containing a relatively low number of cell bodies. The most prevalent anatomical region of neuropil is the brain which, although not completely composed of neuropil, does have the largest and highest synaptically concentrated areas of neuropil in the body. For example, the neocortex and olfactory bulb both contain neuropil.
Glia, also called glial cells(gliocytes) or neuroglia, are non-neuronal cells in the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous system that do not produce electrical impulses. The neuroglia make up more than one half the volume of neural tissue in our body. They maintain homeostasis, form myelin in the peripheral nervous system, and provide support and protection for neurons. In the central nervous system, glial cells include oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, ependymal cells and microglia, and in the peripheral nervous system they include Schwann cells and satellite cells.
Glutamate receptors are synaptic and non synaptic receptors located primarily on the membranes of neuronal and glial cells. Glutamate is abundant in the human body, but particularly in the nervous system and especially prominent in the human brain where it is the body's most prominent neurotransmitter, the brain's main excitatory neurotransmitter, and also the precursor for GABA, the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter. Glutamate receptors are responsible for the glutamate-mediated postsynaptic excitation of neural cells, and are important for neural communication, memory formation, learning, and regulation.
David Moore Glover is a British geneticist and Research Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He served as Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, a Wellcome Trust investigator in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He serves as the first editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Open Biology published by the Royal Society.
Tobias Bonhoeffer is a German-American neurobiologist. He is director of the department Synapses – Circuits – Plasticity and current managing director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence ). His father, the neurobiologist Friedrich Bonhoeffer, was director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen.
Nahum Sonenberg, is an Israeli Canadian microbiologist and biochemist. He is a James McGill professor of biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was an HHMI international research scholar from 1997 to 2011 and is now a senior international research scholar. He is best known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of translation, and notable for the discovery of the mRNA 5' cap-binding protein, eIF4E, the rate-limiting component of the eukaryotic translation apparatus.
Jean Duthie Beggs CBE FRS FRSE DSc is a Scottish geneticist. She is the Royal Society Darwin Trust Professor in the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh.
Andrea Hilary Brand is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”.
Jennifer Lea Stow is deputy director (research), NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and head of the Protein Trafficking and Inflammation laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland, Australia. She was awarded her PhD from Monash University in Melbourne in 1982. As a Fogarty International Fellow, she completed postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine (US) in the Department of Cell Biology. She was then appointed to her first faculty position as an assistant professor at Harvard University in the Renal Unit, Departments of Medicine and Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. At the end of 1994 she returned to Australia as a Wellcome Trust Senior International Medical Research fellow at The University of Queensland where her work has continued. Stow sits on national and international peer review and scientific committees and advisory boards. She has served as head of IMB's Division of Molecular Cell Biology, and in 2008 she was appointed as deputy director (research).
Hugo J. Bellen is a professor at Baylor College of Medicine and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who studies genetics and neurobiology in the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly.
Homeotic protein bicoid is encoded by the bcd maternal effect gene in Drosophilia. Homeotic protein bicoid concentration gradient patterns the anterior-posterior (A-P) axis during Drosophila embryogenesis. Bicoid was the first protein demonstrated to act as a morphogen. Although bicoid is important for the development of Drosophila and other higher dipterans, it is absent from most other insects, where its role is accomplished by other genes.
Mary Bernadette Kennedy is an American biochemist and neuroscientist. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1981. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, the process underlying formation of memory in the central nervous system. Her lab uses biochemical and molecular biological methods to study the protein machinery within a structure called the postsynaptic density. Kennedy has published over 100 papers with over 20,000 total citations.
Erin Margaret Schuman, born May 15, 1963, in California, US, is a neurobiologist who studies neuronal synapses. She is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
Anindya Dutta is an Indian-born American biochemist and cancer researcher, a Chair of the Department of Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine since 2021, who has served as Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2011–2021. Dutta's research has focused on the mammalian cell cycle with an emphasis on DNA replication and repair and on noncoding RNAs. He is particularly interested in how de-regulation of these processes promote cancer progression. For his accomplishments he has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, received the Ranbaxy Award in Biomedical Sciences, the Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the University of Virginia and the Mark Brothers Award from the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Priya Rajasethupathy is a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Rockefeller University, leading the Laboratory of Neural Dynamics and Cognition.
Tara Keck is an American-British neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, at University College London working in the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Pharmacology. She is the Vice-Dean International for the Faculty of Life Sciences. She studies experience-dependent synaptic plasticity, its effect on behaviour and how it changes during ageing and age-related diseases. She has worked in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund on approaches for healthy ageing. Her recent work has focused on loneliness in older people, with a focus on gender. She was named a UNFPA Generations and Gender Fellow in 2022.
Yorgo E. Modis is Professor in Virology and Immunology, and a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge. He is head of The Modis Lab in the Molecular Immunity Unit at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He studies cellular mechanisms of viral gene sensing and silencing. His group employs a diverse set of complementary biophysical approaches including cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM), X-ray crystallography, solution biophysics, fluorescence microscopy and cell biological approaches to understand the cellular mechanisms of viral gene sensing and silencing in molecular-level detail.
Cagla Eroglu is a Turkish neuroscientist and associate professor of cell biology and neurobiology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Eroglu is also the director of graduate studies in cell and molecular biology at Duke University Medical Center. Eroglu is a leader in the field of glial biology, and her lab focuses on exploring the role of glial cells, specifically astrocytes, in synaptic development and connectivity.
Juri Rappsilber is a German chemist in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics.
Andrea Pauli is a developmental biologist and biochemist studying how the egg transitions into an embryo, and more specifically the molecular mechanisms underlying vertebrate fertilisations, egg dormancy, and subsequent egg activation. Her lab uses zebrafish as the main model organism. Andrea Pauli is a group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria.
