Jason Snyder 
With the launch of Functional Neurogenesis, it has been 10 years since I started studying adult neurogenesis. I did my undergraduate and training in the Department of Physiology at the University of Toronto. While I am interested in the output of the system (behavior) and underlying mechanisms (synaptic function, circuit activity), it is the relationship between these different levels of function that is central to my long-term goal of understanding the role of adult neurogenesis in memory and mood disorders.
I did my graduate work in the lab of Martin Wojtowicz at the University of Toronto. Along with Sabrina Wang, we did early work showing enhanced synaptic plasticity in young, adult-born granule neurons. I then became interested in the behavioral function of adult neurogenesis and published a study implicating adult neurogenesis in long-term memory.
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health / National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD in the lab of Heather Cameron. As a postdoc I have used immediate-early gene imaging to identify neurons that are (putatively) activated by synaptic input during behavior. Using this strategy I have analyzed whether learning a stressful spatial task differentially activates new neurons in the dorsal and ventral subregions of the dentate gyrus, regions known to have different roles in spatial and stress-related behaviors, respectively. In another study I found that, in addition to its known effect of increasing neuronal proliferation, exercise also accelerates the integration of new neurons into hippocampal circuitry. Most recently, as a result of moving from rat studies (graduate) to mouse studies (postdoc) and noticing that some fundamental features of new neurons seemed to be different between the two species, I decided to systematically compare neurogenesis in mice and rats. It turned out that adult neurogenesis is very different in the two species: rats had more new neurons, their new neurons matured faster, and inhibiting neurogenesis had a greater effect on behavior in rats than in mice. An image1 from this study can be seen on the cover of the 11/18/09 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
I enjoy teaching neuroscience, and participate in neuroscience education at Brain Awareness Week and Take Your Child to Work Day. I also think, in addition to blogs and websites, other online social and/or sharing tools could be useful for collaboration and consultation within neuroscience / neurogenesis communities – have you ever found that when visiting a lab, moving to a new lab, or talking to colleagues, that you come away with useful nuggets of information? New ideas, protocol tweaks, papers you missed, experimental confounds you hadn’t thought of? The goal of Functional Neurogenesis is to facilitate communication within the neurogenesis / neuroscience community (and beyond?). If you have any ideas I’d be happy to hear them: jasonscottsnyder (at gmail), Twitter, Friendfeed.
1The image is from a 4 week-old mouse, which therefore had a lot of neurogenesis. Incidentally, mouse tissue consistently produced prettier pictures than rat tissue (not discussed in the paper).
Publications
Snyder JS, Kee NJ, Wojtowicz JM (2001) Effects of adult neurogenesis on synaptic plasticity in the rat dentate gyrus. [pdf] J. Neurophysiol. 85: 2423-2431.
Snyder JS, Hong NS, McDonald RJ, Wojtowicz JM (2005) A role for adult neurogenesis in long-term memory. [pdf] Neuroscience 130: 843-852.
Winocur G, Wojtowicz JM, Sekeres M, Snyder JS, Wang S (2006) Inhibition of neurogenesis interferes with hippocampus-dependent memory function. [pdf] Hippocampus 16: 296-304.
Snyder JS, Radik R, Wojtowicz JM, Cameron HA (2009) Anatomical gradients of adult neurogenesis and activity: Young neurons in the ventral dentate gyrus are activated by water maze training. [pdf] Hippocampus 19: 360-370.
Snyder JS, Glover LR, Sanzone KM, Kamhi JF, Cameron HA (2009) The effects of exercise and stress on the survival and maturation of adult-generated granule cells. [pdf] Hippocampus 19: 898-906.
Snyder JS, Ramchand P, Rabbett S, Radik R, Wojtowicz JM, Cameron HA (2009) Septo-temporal gradients of neurogenesis and activity in 13-month-old rats. [pdf] Neurobiol. Aging, in press, doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2009.05.022
Snyder JS, Choe J, Clifford M, Jeurling S, Hurley P, Brown A, Kamhi J, Cameron HA (2009) Adult-born hippocampal neurons are more numerous, faster maturing and more involved in behavior in rats than in mice. [17mb pdf] J. Neurosci. 29: 14484-14495.
