Lectures and seminars Guest seminar: Prof. Catherine Hall, University of Sussex
Welcome to this guest seminar by Prof. Catherine Hall titled "Oxygen availability in the brain. When and where could it limit brain function?"
About the speaker
Prof. Catherine Hall is interested in how the brain balances energy supply and demand. During her PhD (with John Garthwaite, UCL), she studied nitric oxide (NO) consumption by brain tissue. As a post-doctoral researcher (with David Attwell, UCL), she investigated how NO alters how the brain uses oxygen, and what processes of neuronal transmission use the most oxygen. She then studied how NO and other signalling molecules interact to control the brain’s energy supply by regulating the tone of capillary pericytes (neurovascular coupling), and how this regulation is impaired after stroke.
In 2014 she became a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex, and is now trying to understand how small changes in the brain’s energy supply can lead to disease. Her lab uses 2-photon imaging and optical measurement of haemodynamic responses in mouse cortex, corpus callosum and hippocampus, to measure neuronal, glial and vascular responses in vivo, as well as using biochemical assays, brain slice recordings and immunohistochemical labelling of fixed tissue. Utilizing these measurements they interrogate the impact of a reduced oxygen supply on different cell types in different brain regions, and test whether improving oxygen delivery can protect brain function from decline in disease models.
Doctoral Thesis defence
Catherine will be the opponent for Jil Protzmann’s PhD defence on Friday, 4 October:
Key references
- Silvia Anderle, Orla Bonnar et al. Catherine Hall, APOE4 and sedentary lifestyle synergistically impair neurovascular function in the visual cortex of awake mice, 01 July 2024, PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research Square
- Bonnar O, Shaw K, Anderle S, et al. APOE4 expression confers a mild, persistent reduction in neurovascular function in the visual cortex and hippocampus of awake mice. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism. 2023;43(11):1826-1841. doi:10.1177/0271678X231172842
- Shaw, K., Bell, L., Boyd, K., Grijseels, D.M., Clarke, D., Bonnar, O., Crombag, H.S. and Hall, C. N. (2021) Neurovascular coupling and oxygenation are decreased in hippocampus compared to neocortex because of microvascular differences. Nature Communications 12 (1), 1-16
- Clarke, Devin, Crombag, Hans S and Hall, Catherine N (2021) An open-source pipeline for analysing changes in microglial morphology. Open Biology, 11 (8). 210045 1-15. ISSN 2046-2441
- Grijseels, Dori M, Shaw, Kira, Barry, Caswell and Hall, Catherine N (2021) Choice of method of place cell classification determines the population of cells identified. PLoS Computational Biology, 17 (7). a1008835 1-32. ISSN 1553-734X
- Hall , C.N., Reynell, C., Gesslein, B., Hamilton, N.B., Mishra, A., Sutherland, B.A., O’Farrell, F., Buchan, A., Lauritzen, M. and Attwell, D. (2014) Capillary pericytes regulate cerebral blood flow in health and disease. Nature. 508(7494):55-60
- Hall, C.N., Klein-Flügge, M, Howarth, C and Attwell, D. (2012) Oxidative phosphorylation, not glycolysis, powers presynaptic and postsynaptic mechanisms underlying brain information processing. J. Neurosci. 32, 8940-51
- Hamilton, N., Attwell, D. and Hall, C.N. (2010) Pericyte-mediated regulation of capillary diameter: a component of neurovascular coupling in health and disease. Front. Neuroenerg. 2:5. doi:10.3389/fnene.2010.00005.