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MacDonald
The lab welcomes three new UCL Masters Students for 2024/2025.
Nikol will work with Gina to explore new genes regulating Muller glial tiling and neuronal contacts in the zebrafish retina.
Anson will work with Ola to study retina development and Muller glia regenerative potential in the killifish.
Isabella will work with Nicole to study sex-specific differences in retina degeneration phenotypes in killifish.
Look forward to see what they discover!
The most impactful thing we can do is train and support people to progress their careers, and ultimate reach their career goals. Three former members of the lab have gone on to further their academic careers.
Dr. Manuela Lahne was a postdoc in the lab from 2022-2023. She will start this fall as a tenure-track Lecturer at Queen Mary University in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences.
Dr. Natalia Jaroszynska was the first PhD student in the MacDonald lab at UCL. She has completed her degree and now moved on as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Caroline Hill at the Crick Institute.
Ms. Aanandita Kothurkar joined as a Research technician after her MSc at UCL in 2022-2024. She has now started her PhD as part of the prestigious BBSRC WhiteRose PhD Programme at the University of Sheffield in the laboratory of Dr. Andrew Lin.
We're proud to have played a small part in their careers and can't wait to see all that they accomplish!
It's that time of year again and we are lucky to welcome three students to the laboratory for the summer. We have Kristen, 2nd year UCL undergrad, that will be joining Xhuljana to work on glial development projects. Joshua, Cambridge undergrad, who received a bursary from Churchill College Camrbidge to work with Nicole on a Killifish retinal ageing project. Matias, PhD student with Leo Valdivia in Chile, who will join us on a EMBO short-term fellowship to look at new genes involved in Muller glia development.
Moorfields Eye Charity is the leading charity in the UK funding research into eye health and innovation and improvement in patient care to help patients at Moorfields and globally. The MacDonald lab in incredibly grateful for the support from the charity, which includes PhD studentships and Springboard awards, allowing them to expediate their exploration into glial mechanisms of health and disease. Importantly, the charity has also funded several equipment grants to build a dedicated aquatics suite in the Institute of Ophthalmology. Initially this was just zebrafish in 2019, however in 2024 the unit was expanded to house the emerging ageing model, Killifish. This gives the MacDonald lab, and several other research groups (Moosajee, Young, Futter), access to state of the art facilties to house their animals and conduct world leading eye research.
https://moorfieldseyecharity.org.uk/downloads/Impact-report-2024-final-low-res.pdf
Dr. Nicole Noel has been awarded the prestigious CIHR Banting Postdoctoral fellowship to continue her project on modelling age-related macular degeneration in the emerging rapidly ageing model the killifish. Nicole joined the lab in 2022 on a BrightFocus postdoctoral fellowship and has made several exciting discoveries around the molecular mechanisms underpinning age-related degenerations, including those that are similar to what happens in human disease. Some of these findings were published earlier in 2024 with Nicole as co-first author (https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.14192). We can't wait to see what Nicole finds in the news few years!
https://banting.fellowships-bourses.gc.ca/en/2023-2024-eng.html
We're excited that an image from our PhD student Natalia Jaroszynska was awarded the cover of the upcoming issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Natalia is first author on a paper characterising c9orf72 mutant zebrafish in a collaboration between the MacDonald and Keatinge labs (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/44/25/e2128232024.long). This paper identifies potential retinal degeneration phenotypes in the eye that may be relevant for patients with motor neuron disease.
Also cited here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioo/news/2024/jun/confocal-image-one-our-labs-cover-journal-neuroscience
Gina is a BBSRC LiDO student and Marybelle is a UCL Excellence Scholar. If you would like to read more about thier projects and interests click on the images below.
Marybelle Cameron-Pack
Gina Gilpin
This year the lab celebrated 2023 with Christmas lunch at an Italian restaurant before heading off to axe throwing. Everyone had a great time and managed to leave with all of their fingers.
Ryan turned 40 this year. So the lab bought him very useful tools for his old age. Manuela also made him his favourite type of cake - a Muller glia cake.
Ola earned her Master's degree in Neurosciences from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and conducted research for her master's thesis at Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School. There, she focused on developing patient-specific stem cell models to assess the safety and efficacy of antisense oligonucleotide therapy for dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy (DRPLA).
Driven by a keen interest in retinal biology and in vivo disease modeling, she joined the MacDonald Lab as a PhD student in October 2023. Her project aims to introduce the African turquoise killifish as a model for understanding molecular and cellular dysfunctions underpinning vision loss with ageing.
Outside the lab, Ola enjoys hiking trips, exploring London and watching cinema classics.
The MacDonald lab went out to thank the 3 Bachelor students, Huanlin, Hiba and Nicole, who had joined the lab over the summer.
Six members of the academic staff of the Institute of Ophthalmology were promoted this year, amongst them is our PI Ryan MacDonald you got promoted to Associate Professor. Congratulations!
Click here to find out more.
Manuela Lahne, Ryan MacDonald and Gregory Patient went to the annual European Zebrafish Meeting. Gregory presented his work with Iterative Bleaching Extends Multiplexity (IBEX) which is a highly multiplexed immunohistochemistry technique which allows multiple rounds of immunohistochemistry to be performed on a single tissue sample. More information can be found here.
Welcome Huanlin, Hiba and Nicole to the MacDonald lab. We are excited that you have joined us.
We would like to welcome Dr Artur R Fernandes to the MacDonald lab. He is here as a visiting Postdoc.
Natalia, Manuela and Xhuljana presented posters at the annual IoO ECR Symposium. Natalia won the best communication poster award and second runner-up scientific poster award. Congratulations!
The London Zebrafish Club was hosted at King’s College this time where Manuela Lahne held a fantastic talk about “regional retinoic acid levels dictate photoreceptor specialisation”.
Ryan and Nicole were at the Nothobranchius conference in Leuven, Belgium with their collaborators Moons lab (Lieve, Steven and Luca), Brian Clark, Phil Ruzycki, and Chi-Kuo Hu.
We are excited to share that our previous postdoc Dr. Elisabeth Kugler started her own company “Zeeks - Art for Geeks” where she combines her passion for science and art. She offers consulting on data analysis and offers beautiful high resolution images of the zebrafish retina and vasculature as science art and merchandise.
Go check it out https://zeeks-artforgeeks.com.
We would like to welcome our new lab technician Aanandita Kothurkar who has joined us since January from Karin Tuschl’s lab where she did a masters titled “Elucidating the role of ATP13A1 in manganese transport and neurodevelopment”.
