BNA2023 Festival of Neuroscience

Posted on: 25 April 2023 by Filippo Dall'Armellina in April 2023 posts

Filippo Dall’Armellina is a first year PhD student in the Department of Biochemistry, Cell and Systems Biology. He recently attended the British Neuroscience Association Festival in Brighton and told us all about his trip.

Introducing Filippo

I am a curious and enthusiastic first-year PhD student in Dr Laura Swan’s laboratory. We aim to elucidate the regulatory pathways of lipid balance inside the cell and that are associated with the development of a wide spectrum of progressive neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and neuromuscular diseases.

What conference did you attend?

I had the great opportunity to travel to Brighton to attend and present my poster at the BNA2023 Festival of Neuroscience. It was quite disorientating walking around the venue at first, with so many conference rooms and floors to get to. I presented my poster last Sunday, the first day of the event. Travelling to Brighton and back to Liverpool was a relatively long journey since it took around five hours on the train, but it was worth it in the end.

At the event, the speakers and poster presenters tackled a wide range of great topics in neuroscience from α-synucleinopathies to lysosomal and mitochondrial-related disorders. I particularly enjoyed attending the talks on such a vast spectrum of neurodegenerative disorders as there was always an opportunity to learn something new.

How did the poster session go?

I met other researchers interested in the role of lipid homeostasis and organelle trafficking and it was fantastic to hear what they had to say. I’m glad I was able to share insight into the mechanisms of novel lipid transferases located at organelle contacts. My poster received an Open Data Badge at the conference and described work that I did last summer to investigate in silico the structure and function of VPS13 proteins, a novel class of large lipid transferases that sit between multiple organelles inside the cell. Various researchers came up to me to discuss the work done and future research to be expected. I really enjoyed being able to share ideas with researchers from many different labs around the world. I even managed to bump into a few other PhD students from the University of Liverpool who were presenting their most recent results! Neuroscientists came together to share their passion for understanding the brain and nervous system in health and disease, which created a very stimulating environment.

You can find the paper my poster was based on here:

Dall’Armellina F, Stagi M, Swan L E (2022) ‘In silico modeling human VPS13 proteins associated with donor and target membranes suggests lipid transfer mechanisms’, Proteins, 91(4):439-455. doi: 10.1002/prot.26446.