2013 AAAS Annual Meeting--> Boston Trip

On the 14th of February, Mr. Calos, Mr. Evans, Ms. Hatton, few of the science interns and I went to the AAAS meeting at Boston. The first night we had a really nice dinner at Joe's and the next day we woke up at 7:00 am ready to attend the meeting. As a person who lacks a sense of direction (except underground), I was not surprise when we got lost the minute we got to Hynes Convention Center, which was connected to our hotel. However, we got registered and went to forums that each of us are interested in.

2/15
Symposia that I went:
1) Is Beauty Truth? Mathematics in Physics from Dirac to the Higgs Boson and Beyond (went to this because I just read an article online that talked about the Higgs Boson, which was a newly discovered particle. Also because I am interning at the Particle Physics department and want to know more about the topics).
2) The Science of Uncertainty in Genomic Medicine
3) More Than Pretty Pictures: How the Process of Making Science Images and Graphics Clarifies Understanding
//Poster Sessions for 20 minutes//
4)Science Advances and New Strategies for Reconstruction of Oral and Facial Tissues.
5)Stroke Research: New Concepts and Innovative Solutions
6) Sherry Turkle: The Robotic Moment: What Do We Forget When We Talk to Machines.
//Dinner and rest//

Because there were so many talks that I wanted to go, I barely have time to rest and go outside. Sherry and I (we went as a team because I do not own a cellphone) sat through all of the talks except for the Facial Reconstruction one because it was overlapped with the Stroke Research presentations. During the half hour break we had in the morning (in between two talks) Sherry and I went to the exhibitions. We talked to several people and got a lot of souvenirs. :)

2/16
1)The Connectome: From the Synapse to Brain Networks in Health and Disease.
2) Family Science--> this was lots of fun, I saw a lot of demonstrations and attempted to ask a really hard question for the "Ask an Engineer" booth but failed, partly because of the lack of time (only had 10 minutes in the Family Science Event).

I don't know why.. but Sherry and I found extra time to go to the exhibitions again. This time we listened a lecture at NASA's booth and talked to a person from Wolfram who introduced us to Mathemetica and a search engine (the "mother" of Siri)--> more souvenirs ensued~

Sharing time~
The two talks that are easier to explain with only words and are also very interesting are:
1) A Data Driven Pathway to Genomic Medicine (Robert C. Green)
Dr. Green from Partners Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine. As technology advances "personalization" of health care using one's genetic code has became a new possibility. Dr. Green talks about G2P "Genomes to People" which is a research in Translational Genomics and Health outcomes. He focuses on the REVEAL study (Risk Evaluation and Education for Alzheimer's Disease). In the study, each individual has their genes coded and the researchers found out that as individual possess one or more copies of APOE (E₄ ) genotype he/she is more likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease. It turns out that APOE gene is also linked to the Heart Disease which is reasonable since Alzheimer's is due to the lack of blood flow. The results also show that after the individuals got their results back, they have increased their exercise and improved their diet. People handled the data well. However, the insurance companies will be at risk after the "personalization" of health care become publicized because they are going to loose a lot of money.
--> a counterargument was presented by James P. Evans (Jim) from University of North Carolina. He said that genomics in clinical medicine may only be useful when the the disease is rare because they have less factors, whereas the common diseases has too many etiologic factors and risk alleles that are going to be hard to predict the possibility of actually getting that disease.

2)Molecules and Mechanisms Involving in Synaptic Plasticity in Health and Disease (Mark F. Bear, MIT)
Dr. Bear talked bout the plasticity of the synapses that leads to Amblyopia and Autism. In my blog I am going to focus on the Autism part.
Fragile X Syndrome: a intellectual disability, a cause of Autism. Has
LTD (Long Term Depressing): serves to selectively weaken specific synapses in order to make constructive use of synaptic strengthening caused by LTP (wikipedia).--> enhanced--> Autism. LTD is enhanced by unusually amount of AMPAR internalization (see figure below) which is due to a lack of FMRP protein that acts as a initiator of the AMPAR internalization and also a negative feedback inhibitor that stops more FMRP protein generation therefore stops the internalization of AMPAR.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304416509000348

A. In normal brains, FMRP is produced normally, making good amounts of AMPA receptor when mGluR5 receptor is activated. 

B. in Fragile X Syndrome FMRP is silenced therefore there is an abundance of AMPAR internalization causing LTD to be enhanced (causing abnormal dendrites spines to be formed in patients with Fragile X Syndrome, less contact with other neurons, neurons weakened--> mental disability)

C. in therapy MPEP is used to silence mGluR5 which slows down the internalization of AMPA (not in his talk but from the website). What he said was only to inhibit mGluR5 but I did not hear things about MPEP.