Caenorhabditis elegans might not be an animal you’re particularly familiar with, but this humble little worm is one of the most important tools we have for studying metals in biological systems. These 1 mm long roundworms are self-fertilising, meaning you can raise literally millions of genetically identical offspring, and they were the first multi-cellular organism to have their entire genome mapped.

In a paper we’ve just published (coming from blog contributor Dr Gawain McColl) in Metallomics (grab it for free here), we partnered with researchers at the Australian Synchrotron’s X-ray Fluorescence  Microscopy beamline and our new collaborator Dr Verena Wimmer, who runs the great Florey Advanced Microscopy Facility to look at how we can use a range of different techniques to examine metals in this worm at sub-micrometre levels.

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We’ve been harping on about our recent Chemical Science paper, which officially was published this week and can be downloaded for free here. Firstly, thanks to our friend Jonas Marnell of Ethix Design in Melbourne for the amazing cover artwork shown here.

Anyway, we’re not done showing off. We’ve been looking into how we can best represent the data we’ve been generating in new and exciting forms more digestible for the non-neuroscientists.

Read more about what we’ve been up to after the jump.

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Just recently, myself, fellow Ferrumblogger and worm-expert Dr Gawain McColl, with friends of the blog Dr Martin de Jonge (a physicist from the Australian Synchrotron) and Dr Elizabeth New from Sydney University published a tutorial review in the famed chemistry journal, Chemical Society Reviews (you can access the paper for free here). This paper set out to describe to the undergraduate chemistry student and above just what’s out there when it comes to imaging metals in biology at the level of the cell. In what turned out to be one of the more enjoyable papers to write, this review covers a range of topics that is designed to help fellow chemists and biologists alike appreciate just how much better science is when we all work together. Read more after the jump, and credit to our friend Jonas Marnell at Ethix Design for the funky artwork that appeared on the journal’s back cover.

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Readers of this blog would have noticed a common theme: we seem to think metals have an awful lot to do with neurodegeneration. What we’re not sure of is whether this is a simple effect of disease, or maybe part of the cause. Just a few days ago, a Perspective from Dominic Hare and Philip Doble from UTS, David Finkelstein, Nicole Jenkins and Ashley Bush from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health and long-time collaborator of Dominic’s, A/Prof Manish Arora of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City was published online at Nature Reviews Neurology discussing how iron exposure during early life might be at the very root of neurodegeneration, and how the secrets might be unlocked by looking into our teeth.

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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) affects over 10 million people every year, including over 22,000 Australians. It’s also one of the leading causes of death and injury for young people, and has been implicated in the development of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease later in life. Repeated brain injury is very likely the reason Muhammad Ali developed Parkinson’s disease, likely towards the end of his boxing career. We’ve just recently published a Communication over at Metallomics describing how, in the brains of people who died as a result of TBI, levels of soluble cobalt (Co) are significantly increased.

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Dominic Hare recently gave a public lecture as part of the UTS Science in Focus called ‘How the brain destroys itself’, described as:

…a cautionary tale about how our brains grow, live and die; and how the chemistry of the brain that makes humans so unique might be responsible for why things go wrong.

You can watch the video below, and read the transcript here.