Research Associate (Newcastle)

Vacancy Reference Number

19121

Closing Date

12 May 2022

Salary

£31,406 - £40,927 per annum

Address

Newcastle University

Duration

This post is fixed term for a period of 42 months.

About the job

Are you interested in understanding how developing neurones and blood vessels interact to form the neurovascular unit? 

This is a unique opportunity to become involved in an exciting project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that will investigate how early retinal spontaneous waves of activity may guide the development of retinal vasculature.

You will be the main Research Associate working on this project, together with a PhD student. You will use state-of-the-art electrophysiological and imaging approaches to investigate fundamental unresolved questions in developmental neuroscience.

The Project - Spontaneous neuronal activity emerges at early developmental stages in the CNS, long before sensory experience is even possible. It always coincides with vascularisation, suggesting a close link between these events. However, little is known about that causative link because it is challenging to study in 3-dimensional brain networks.

The retina offers unique opportunities to study these questions because blood vessels initially grow in a planar fashion, just above the retinal output ganglion cell layer. At the same time, waves of electrical activity sweep across the entire layer. We recently found evidence for the presence of transient cellular clusters associated with hotspots of spontaneous activity and with the progression of blood vessel outgrowth in the neonatal retina. We hypothesize that these transient cells are highly active neurones that generate hypoxic conditions, thereby attracting nascent blood vessels to provide local oxygen supply.

This project aims to investigate the nature of these cluster cells and understand how they are involved in angiogenesis, thereby uncovering important principles that govern the development and maturation of neurovascular networks in the CNS.

The project will use cutting-edge molecular techniques (single-cell RNA sequencing) combined with novel in vitro experimental approaches recently established in Newcastle (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/bioimaging/flamefacility/), bringing together high resolution electrical and optical recordings.

For informal enquiries contact - evelyne.sernagor@newcastle.ac.uk or majlinda.lako@newcastle.ac.uk