Guest Editors
Yutaka Kawakami
Odawara Municipal Hospital, Department of Anesthesiology
Yutaka Kawakami was working not only as a medical doctor (department of anaesthesiology), but also as a postdoctoral fellow at Yokohama City University Graduate School, Department of Physiology, and involved in ex vivo imaging of actin dynamics at neuronal spines in mouse cortex. He is now involved in neuroscience research about molecules modulating axonal extension and regeneration.
Tomoko Satake
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Institute of Innovative Research, Homeostatic Mechanism Research Unit
Tomoko Satake was working as a part-time lab technician when she entered research for the first time. After that, she studied molecular and cellular biology and finally received her PhD from Yokohama City University. She mastered “in utero electroporation (IUE)”, a plasmid transfection technic for embryonic mouse brains. She recently reported that introduction of Epstein–Barr virus-based plasmid by IUE enables studying the long-term development of the cerebral cortex from prenatal to postnatal periods at cellular level.
Collection Overview
Short-term in vitro experiments are not sufficient for overall understandings even though they can partly reconstitute long-term phenomena in vivo. Therefore, in vivo experiments in model mammals are necessary, in addition to improved ex vivo methods. Particularly, less-invasive protocols for transgene expression, drug administration, live cell imaging, and cell-type selective manipulation in these conditions are helpful to investigate various long-term phenomena at cellular level. Also, the protocols targeting key molecules of interest with some techniques such as photobleaching and optogenetic approach are welcome.
This collection aims to provide and share both widely applicable protocols and modern experiments studying astrocytes for long-term phenomena in brains. Furthermore, actual research examples performed by introducing and combining multiple in vivo technics will also be showcased. These technics give strong boost for the research tackling complicated long-term phenomena of brain development, maintenance, and disorders.
