This report covers a period of 6 months, up to 03/2015, when the Section of Model Synaptic Systems closed. The section chief, Dr. Fumihito Ono, left NIAAA on 03/27/2015 to become Professor and Chairman at the Department of Physiology, Osaka Medical College in Japan. Postdocs in the section also moved to their next position during this period. Dr. Tory Williams accepted the position of lecturer at the University of Maryland. Dr. Meghan Mott was awarded a fellowship for science policy at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Jee-Young Park was hired by a pharmaceutical company in South Korea. A review paper entitled Zebrafish mutants of the neuromuscular junction: Swimming in the gene pool was published in the Journal of Physiological Sciences. It provides an overview of zebrafish mutants with dysfunctional acetylcholine receptors or related proteins at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). The NMJ, which has served as the classical model of the chemical synapse, uses acetylcholine as the neurotransmitter, and mutations of proteins involved in the signaling cascade lead to a variety of behavioral phenotypes. Mutants isolated after random chemical mutagenesis screening were summarized, and advances in the field resulting from these mutants were discussed in the review. In order to complete projects started at NIAAA, resources including established genetic lines were transferred to a new lab in Osaka. The results obtained from these projects will be published as soon as remaining experiments are completed.
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