Survive and communicate: a tale of presynaptic vesicle trafficking... with a few elephants in the house!

Professor Frederic Meunier
Queensland Brain Institute
The University of Queensland

Abstract: The human brain contains 86 billion neurons and each neuron is connected to other neurons via an average of 7,000 synaptic connections. So that’s around 600 trillion connections! The synapse is therefore a unique environment where vesicle trafficking not only mediate communication between neurons but also survival. The survival signal generated at the presynapse relies on long range retrograde axonal transport of signalling endosomes to inform the cell body. Very little is known of the presynaptic trafficking events controlling generation the generation of signalling endosomes and how such transport encodes for the level of activity experienced at the synapse. I will discuss some of our recent work in our attempt to answer some of these questions.  As the majority of the presynaptic volume is occupied by 46 nm synaptic vesicles, our lab has developed novel super-resolution techniques based on single molecules imaging to track the these vesicles in real time.

Bio: Professor Frederic Meunier obtained his Master’s degree in Neurophysiology at the Paris XI University, France in 1992 and completed his Ph.D in Neurobiology at the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette, France in 1996. He was the recipient of a European Biotechnology Fellowship and went on to postgraduate work at the Department of Biochemistry at Imperial College (1997-1999) and at Cancer Research UK (2000-2002) in London, UK. After a short sabbatical at the LMB-MRC in Cambridge (UK), he became a group leader at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2003. He joined the Queensland Brain Institute of the University of Queensland in 2007 and obtained an NHMRC senior research fellowship in 2009 renewed in 2014 with promotion and in 2018. He became Professor in 2014 at the Queensland Brain Institute and is currently part of the Centre for Ageing Dementia Research.