James Hallett
University of Portsmouth, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.95.43

Portsmouth is found in the south of England and is the UK’s only ‘island city’. Famous for being a major military hub, it is gaining a lot of attention as a major university town, and is the perfect place to house a laboratory that specialises in glia.

We are a multinational (currently UK, France, Italy, Greece, Iran, Algeria, Singapore), multidisciplinary team interested in all aspects of the physiology of glial cells. The glia community have a difficult job to convince neurophysiologists that glia are not just ‘support cells’, but play essential roles in neurophysiology and pathology of various CNS diseases.

Between me and four PhD students, we are working on various projects including ion channel physiology in astrocytes and oligodendrocytes (Maria Papanikolaou, me), glial glutamate metabotropic receptors and the role of glia in Alzheimer’s disease (Ilaria Vanzulli), and properties of drugs in glial proliferation and differentiation (Andrea Rivera, Francesca Pieropan). To answer these questions, we use a variety of techniques including optic nerve explant and organotypic slice cultures, global and conditional knock-out mice, immunohistochemistry, qPCR, Western blot, microarray, and electrophysiology including patch clamping and action potential recordings.

The university is a relatively small but significant hub of neuroscience and ion channel research; across the corridor from us is one of the UK’s leading brain tumour research groups, and there are also other groups whose interests span from yeast ion channels to depression. As the unit is small, everybody knows everybody, which creates a collaborative environment with many shared resources between groups. We also get a high number of students and interns from the UK and abroad; this academic year, we have had three undergraduates and one taught Masters student from UoP, as well as two Erasmus students from France (University of Rouen and College de France) who both got here on the ferry, post-Masters interns from the UK, Spain and Italy, a high school student from Singapore and a Masters student from King’s College London. As can be imagined, a lab with so many nationalities, cultures and backgrounds comes with its own sets of advantages and disadvantages. Some students from hotter countries sometimes see photos of Portsmouth in the sun and are slightly disappointed when they arrive in a flurry of wind and rain!

We also have a number of collaborations, with some examples in King’s, UCL, Warwick, Southampton and Bilbao, as well as closer to home in Portsmouth itself. The high number of techniques employed and the high number of students coming in and out of the lab ensure that we have to continually strive to create a proficient training environment. We gladly share our technical expertise with our students to create a new generation of budding gliophysiologists. However, when we don’t feel like sharing, you can find us at the beach and/or pub.