A postdoc position is offered in the lab of the Neuromuscular Plasticity at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw (Poland).
We are seeking an enthusiastic young scientist, who would like to come to Warsaw for 3 years and participate in the realization of our project titled: “Spinal cord repair from endogenous stem cells in the spinal niche (NEURONICHE)” sponsored by the EU program ERA-NET CoFund under Horizon 2020 (http://en.nencki.gov.pl/job/
This is a consortium project that is comprised of colleagues from the UK, Germany, Belgium, France and Poland, among them basic neuroscientists and neurosurgeons. The group from Poland propose to use the intra-spinal grafting of the serotonergic neurons of embryonic origin that is known to enhance locomotor recovery (Sławińska et al., 2000, 2013, 2014) to investigate whether this strategy can also promote host neurogenesis as was described for descending serotonergic neurons in zebrafish by British group (Barreiro-Iglesias et al., 2015). We will also use our model to investigate which factors investigated by other groups in the European consortium can be useful to enhance grafted 5- HT neuron survival and growth of their axons in the spinal cord of paraplegic rats.
In order to move forward from the use of fetal tissue for intra-spinal grafting that has been successful in the past, our ambition is to derive 5- HT neurons in vitro from stem cells. For this purpose we are establishing a new unit for tissue culture equipped with new state-of-the-art equipment. The next important step will be to investigate whether these serotonergic neurons generated in vitro from stem cells are able to enhance recovery of hind limb locomotor movements in paraplegic rats as demonstrated with fetal raphe tissue. This important proof of concept will require us to develop in our lab a new experimental setup and method for neuronal culture in order to use stem cells as the source of 5-HT neurons for grafting.
More details are described here. The deadline for application is 18th of June.