Congratulations to Mark Rigby who has been awarded a NC3Rs Postdoctoral Training Fellowship that will enable him to become trained in the differentiation of motor neurons and muscle from human induced pluripotent stem cell (hIPSC).

Mark received his PhD from University College London, for his work on presynaptic AMPA receptor auxiliary subunits in the laboratories of Professor Mark Farrant and Professor Stuart Cull-Candy. He showed that transmembrane AMPAR regulatory protein δ-2 is required for the modulation of GABA release by presynaptic, work that was published in 2015 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

In early 2015, Mark joined Professor Juan Burrone's research group, as a Postdoctoral research associate to work on axonal voltage propagation. Over the next two years, by using a combination of the latest genetically encoded sensors to study voltage and calcium in discrete compartments of neuronal axons, Mark hopes to shed light on how voltage propagation and calcium signalling are affected by the presence of mitochondria. Currently, he is developing a human inducible pluripotent stem cell (hIPSC) derived co-culture of motor neurons and muscle on microfluidic devices, this will provide a high throughput and transferable model of axonal functional imaging which has the potential to replace rat and mouse use.

For more information on the NC3Rs Training Fellowship, visit their website: website