The UCL Neuroscience Symposium, now in its 9th year, provides the perfect opportunity to find out more about the latest research in neuroscience at UCL, and further afield. The renowned neuroscientists Professor Daniel Wolpert (University of Cambridge) and Matt Botvinik (DeepMind) will deliver keynote lectures and there will be two large poster sessions, featuring over 120 research and lab posters.
BMG LABTECH are delighted to be sponsoring a symposium of this quality. BMG LABTECH plate readers are applicable to a wide range of different neuroscience applications because of the variety of detection modes.
The ability to capture fast, full UV/vis absorbance spectra, to monitor rapid and slow kinetic reactions, and to perform fluorescence intensity (incl. FRET), luminescence (incl. BRET), TR-FRET and AlphaScreen®/AlphaLISA® detection, BMG LABTECH’s CLARIOstar® and FLUOstar® Omega are ideal tools for today’s neuroscientist.
One important neuroscience application for BMG LABTECH plate readers involves amyloid fibrils, implicated in a number of diseases including Alzheimer's. These diseases, known collectively as amyloidosis, are associated with misfolding of a particular protein, into fibrils, which then accumulate in the body's organs as plaques.
Anilinonaphthalene sulphonic acid (ANS) can bind hydrophobic patches on the surface of amyloid fibrils and this molecules fluorescence can then be used to follow fibril formation. A BMG LABTECH multi-mode plate reader has been used to monitor protein aggregation kinetics using measurements of this fluorescence. Amyloid formation was detected by an increase in
ANS-fluorescence intensity and measured kinetically it was simple to make timed ex situ measurements that were outputted into a single file for detailed analysis.
This type of study is particularly important as the number of people developing a neurodegenerative disease later in life is increasing every year and many studies are now looking for the root causes of these diseases, particularly for the sort of small molecule that may trigger the devastating effects.
Cisbio Bioassays, a life science company with more than 30 years of experience of in vitro diagnostics and drug discovery, has developed an assay to detect and quantify tau aggregates in brain tissue. Tau is a protein that binds to microtubular structures and helps regulate their composition. It is therefore crucial for normal cytoskeleton function and abnormal protein configurations will lead to structural collapse. This is particularly crucial in the brain where structural collapse is implicated in plaque formation in diseases such as Alzheimer's.
The level of a patient's tau protein could potentially be a powerful indicator of their neurodegeneration state. Cisbio’s Tau assay performed on a BMG LABTECH’s PHERAstar® FS microplate reader, demonstrates specificity such that it is possible discriminate tau aggregates between the early stages of tau fibrillisation. On the PHERAstar FS this assay has levels of sensitivity that can be applied to cell cultures, brain tissues, and recombinant proteins, where only a small sample volume of 10 µl is needed.
With over 800 neuroscientists expected to attend the 2018 UCL Neuroscience Symposium, delegates will have the ideal opportunity to foster collaborations and create new cross-
disciplinary links. They can also learn more about the different BMG LABTECH plate readers and the relevant applications directly applicable to neuroscience research today. By focusing on the needs of the scientific community, BMG LABTECH’s plate readers have earned the company an enviable reputation, in neuroscience and other related Life Science fields.