The awards, known as the Gerard de Boer price, where handed out to Master student Martijn Sierksma and PhD-student Arthur de Jong. Their posters where selected from a field of 65 competitors. Winners receive a one-year subscription to Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Martijn’s winning poster presents data he gathered during a six-month internship at CNCR’s department of integrative neurophysiology. In the group of Rhiannon Meredith, he obtained electrophysiological data on inhibitory neurotransmission in a mouse model for the fragile-x syndrome. For this, he collaborated closely with Ioannis Kramvis, who is a PhD-student in Rhiannon’s group.
In few words, but rather through excellent use of graphical material, the poster provides detailed information about the results obtained by Sierksma and his colleagues. In the hippocampus of young mice, they found no effect of knocking out the fragile-x gene on GABA-ergic neurotransmission. Martijn is about to perform additional experiments to see if this accounts for the hippocampi of adult mice as well.
In an aesthetically sound fashion, Arthur’s poster presents the robust data that has been published in the Journal of Cell Biology earlier this year. Together with colleagues Sabine Schmitz and Ruud Toonen from the department for Functional Genomics, he found the distance between the post-synaptic terminal and the cell body to be a determinant for pre-synaptic strength.
