Revealing Functional Mechanisms of Synaptic Transmission by High-Pressure Freezing

Frédéric Leroux completed his Master degree in Biology in 2007 at the University of Ghent where he gained experience in biological EM sample preparation. In 2008, he moved to the physics department at the University of Antwerp where he obtained his PhD in 2012. At the EMAT research group he specialized in advanced electron microscopy of composite materials and polymers. In 2016, he joined Leica Microsystems as Application Specialist Nanotechnology. He thereby uses his multidisciplinary background and broad microscopy experience to improve EM sample preparation of a variety of materials (polymers, composites, biological and industrial materials).

Dr. Carolina Borges-Merjane was born in Brazil and studied Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the University of California San Diego (U.S.A.). After obtaining her Bachelor of Science, she joined the lab of Laurence Trussell at the Vollum Institute and Oregon Health & Science University (U.S.A) for her PhD thesis. For her dissertation, she studied glutamatergic synaptic transmission from mossy fiber terminals to unipolar brush cells of the cerebellum and dorsal cochlear nucleus, with electrophysiology and confocal microscopy. After finishing her PhD in 2015, she joined the lab of Professor Peter Jonas at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria, where she was a Marie-Curie Individual Fellow, EMBO Long-Term Fellow and FWF Elise Richter Fellow. She is using electrophysiology and electron microscopy with optogenetics, correlating function and structure, to study synaptic transmission properties under basal and plasticity states, at the hippocampal mossy fiber to CA3 pyramidal neuron synapse.

Olena Kim was born in Ukraine where she obtained Masters degree in Biophysics. In 2015, she moved to Austria to start her Doctoral studies at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria. There she joined the lab of Professor Peter Jonas, which investigates the mechanisms of synaptic communication in hippocampal microcircuits. Her PhD project is about understanding the relation between the function and structure of synapses during neural activity. For this, she is using high pressure freezing coupled to optogenetic stimulation of organotypic slice cultures and acute slices, followed by freeze substitution, serial sectioning and transmission electron microscopy.