SEMINAR: The ups and downs of repairing neural circuits: attractiveness, maturity and meeting your partner.

The Speaker: Rachel Sherrard is a graduate from Sheffield University UK; where she completed her MB ChB in 1987 including a BSc and PhD in developmental neurobiology: She then migrated to Australia working in Brisbane for 4 years in paediatrics. She returned to research in 1993 to use information from her doctorate to focus on post-injury repair in the developing brain using the cerebellum as a model circuit. In this field she has demonstrated that spontaneous repair takes place in the injured neonatal brain through the growth of alternate neural connections and this repair is functionally beneficial. She has extended this showing that these alternate paths can also be generated in the maturing brain by injecting growth promoting peptides into the damaged area. Dr Sherrard has undertaken this work as an academic at QUT, James Cook University, UWA and the University of Notre Dame in Australia and since 2007 at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris France.

The Seminar: Sadly for those afflicted, we still are unable to induce the necessary processes to permit repair in a human brain damaged by injury or disease. A potential therapeutic approach is to recreate the capacity of the immature brain to generate alternate connections that replace those that have been lost and support some functional recovery. Although we have successfully generated similar circuit repair in the young adult brain there are fewer new connections than in the neonatal brain, which raises questions about how mature neurons form and re-form connections. This seminar will present data from in vivo and in vitro models which examine some of the issues. How much repair do you need to improve function? Do mature neurons still respond appropriately to new incoming axons? Can the newly created connections correctly identify their target cell to rebuild an accurate circuit necessary for genuine functional improvement?