This month’s featured researcher is ChangHui Pak, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Her lab investigates how cell adhesion and cell signaling guides synaptic connectivity in the developing human brain with the ultimate goal of understanding how synaptic dysfunction arising from genetic mutations in synaptic molecules contributes to neuropsychiatric disorders. She has two publications appearing in PubMed this month, one is a review of Neurexin gene variation and the other is a primary research paper in collaboration with Yubing Sun from Mechanical and Industrial Engineering that reports about the development of a new device that creates a local chemical microenvironment for engineering organotypic structures in vitro. This work arose from an IONs seed grant.

Here’s what else is new for ‘ ”University of Massachusetts” AND Amherst AND neuroscience’ in PubMed. These publications appeared on line in March. They are just a fraction of the neuroscience research that occurs on campus. You can click on the PubMed ID to find the publication.

1: Montagrin A, Martins-Klein B, Sander D, Mather M. Effects of hunger on emotional arousal responses and attention/memory biases. Emotion. 2021 Feb;21(1):148-158. doi: 10.1037/emo0000680. Epub 2019 Oct 7. PMID: 31589063; PMCID: PMC7781156.

2: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Heterogeneous contributions of change in population distribution of body mass index to change in obesity and underweight. Elife. 2021 Mar 9;10:e60060. doi: 10.7554/eLife.60060. PMID: 33685583; PMCID: PMC7943191.

3: Amgalan A, Taylor P, Mujica-Parodi LR, Siegelmann HT. Unique scales preserve self-similar integrate-and-fire functionality of neuronal clusters. Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 5;11(1):5331. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-82461-4. PMID: 33674620; PMCID: PMC7936002.

4: Nephew BC, Febo M, Cali R, Workman KP, Payne L, Moore CM, King JA, Lacreuse A. Robustness of sex-differences in functional connectivity over time in middle-aged marmosets. Sci Rep. 2020 Oct 6;10(1):16647. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-73811-9. PMID: 33024242; PMCID: PMC7538565.

5: Vaidya AR, Jones HM, Castillo J, Badre D. Neural representation of abstract task structure during generalization. Elife. 2021 Mar 17;10:e63226. doi: 10.7554/eLife.63226. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33729156.

6: Fuccillo MV, Pak C. Copy number variants in neurexin genes: phenotypes and mechanisms. Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2021 Mar 20;68:64-70. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2021.02.010. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33756113.

7: Li N, Yang F, Parthasarathy S, Pierre SS, Hong K, Pavon N, Pak C, Sun Y. Patterning Neuroepithelial Cell Sheet via a Sustained Chemical Gradient Generated by Localized Passive Diffusion Devices. ACS Biomater Sci Eng. 2021 Mar 22. doi: 10.1021/acsbiomaterials.0c01365. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33751893.