Erin Barnhart
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Neurons are some of the most energy-hungry and structurally complex cells in the body. To work properly they must manage calcium, a signaling ion that controls how neurons process inputs and talk to each other, and they must keep mitochondria, the cell's power plants, healthy and spread across long branches.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
Biophysics
- Topics
neuroscience
cell biology
Drosophila
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Compare calcium signals in the cytosol and in the endoplasmic reticulum, the neuron's main calcium store, across defined Drosophila motion vision cell types, using simultaneous in vivo imaging in living flies.
- Test the hypothesis that stimulus-evoked ER calcium release lets neurons boost ATP production to meet changing energy demands, using in vivo imaging of fly visual neurons.
- Manipulate ER calcium handling in neurons with known computational roles and measure the effects on single-cell processing, motion vision circuit function and fly behavior.
- Test whether neuron branching patterns are optimized for mitochondria to self-organize into stable distributions, using a mathematical model built from in vivo motility and branching data and checked against electron microscopy datasets.
- Test whether neurons tune mitochondrial fission and fusion rates to share contents between mitochondria and deliver new proteins to distant axons and dendrites, using live imaging and modeling.
- Probe how neuronal activity relates to mitophagy, the breakdown of damaged mitochondria, in Drosophila visual neurons in vivo.
More about the research
Problems with both are linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The two projects here ask how neurons handle these internal systems inside a living animal. Both use imaging of motion vision neurons in the fruit fly Drosophila, a set of well-mapped visual circuits whose cell types each perform a known computation.
Why it matters
Faulty calcium handling by the ER and defects in mitochondria are both associated with neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Because the mechanisms studied are likely shared across species, the work in flies could give a mechanistic framework for how these failures harm neurons and circuits. That framework may help researchers working on the cellular basis of these diseases identify what goes wrong and when.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Friedman
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Biology
Determine how structural changes are coordinated across the two mitochondrial membranes during mitochondrial fission, the process by which these organelles divide.
Sung Soo Kim
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify which visual features two types of ER neurons extract in the fruit fly anterior visual pathway, using two-photon calcium imaging of tethered flies viewing stimuli in a 360-degree full-color virtual-reality arena.
Shermali Gunawardena
University at Buffalo, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether the N-terminal region of α-synuclein, the Parkinson's-linked protein, controls how mitochondria break into smaller pieces, using transgenic Drosophila carrying N-terminal deletions.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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