Highlights from BNA festival of neuroscience 2021

By Chloe Hall, PhD Student, University of Brighton/UCL

9am Monday morning: BNA festival of neuroscience 2021 here we go! I logged straight on to the session entitled “Brain resilience to pathology”. I find the absolute best thing about conferences is hearing about something adjacent to my work, but that I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise. It’s far too easy to get absorbed in your area of research, but to misquote Ferris Bueller:

So I was really excited to hear Karen Duff talking about why some neurons are more susceptible to tau pathology than others. I added more papers to my “to read” list, where they’ll undoubtedly remain for the next month. Declan King has been making 70nm sections using an ultramicrotome?! That sounds infuriatingly delicate, and I was immediately grateful I can use 500µm sections for my experiments.

Afterwards, I quickly rushed to another stage, where I caught the end of the Using R workshop. Rik Henson feat. Bayesian statistics were making an appearance, quite the hot topic at the moment! You may have heard of Bayes from other work, such as false positivity rates in lateral flow Covid testing. Henson certainly made a curious new fan of them, so I opened RStudio: install.packages(“BayesFactor”).

Then it was time to wander and browse some up-and-coming artists: the first poster session. There were a lot of different formats for this, which kept it varied and I suppose more flexible for the presenters. I particularly liked the video walk-throughs a few people included. This feels like as close to a good substitute for the in-person presentations as we can hope to get!

In Glastonbury terms, the plenary lecture is equivalent to the pyramid stage headliner, and on Wednesday we heard from Bart de Strooper, head of the UK Dementia Research Institute. His group have transplanted human neurons into mouse brain, and these neurons developed tau plaques when in the presence of amyloid plaques. The crowd (me, in my living room) went wild! We’ve known for quite some time that mice do not naturally develop Alzheimer’s like pathology, but human neurons in mouse brain will? What is going on here? Why are mice so hardy against Alzheimer’s and how we can get that same superpower? Like all great headliners, I know I’ll still be thinking about this in years to come.

Not to be overshadowed, glial cells made a big appearance in the afternoon. The crowd participation was great, with plenty of questions flowing in the chat. I found it particularly interesting that there were slightly different microglial characteristics in hippocampal sub-regions, so I am looking forward to following that in future work. The party showed no signs of slowing down in the time, so Soyon Hong encouraged us all to keep the party going in the discussion board afterwards which was a great idea.

Thursday morning dawned, along with a session I had really been looking forward to: Dementia, Sports and Traumatic Brain Injury. There were incredible talks from all four acts, but what made it really special were the Q and A sessions, with the speakers vibing off each other and the audience. Nothing beats that live experience; I’m so pleased there was plenty of time for these discussions.

Then I had a little screen break to do some follow-up reading, as I had a meet and greet (career speed dating) with Elisa Zanier from this morning’s session later in the day. What the BNA Festival of Neuroscience did really well was to create space for these conversations and try to bridge the networking gap which many of us have felt lacking in this virtual age. Despite technical difficulties on my end, I managed to learn more about Elisa’s research, and also get some great advice on marketing my interdisciplinary PhD (mechanical engineering and neuroscience) for the next steps as I begin the search for a postdoc.

And then, like all great festivals, it was over far too soon but full of contented buzz as I get back to my studies.

TL;DR: 5 out of 5, I will definitely be a repeat attender.

Wish it could have been in Brighton, but otherwise a great festival.