DemanNDs Seminar 13th October 2025
DemaNDs Seminar - Monday 13 October 2025
The next DemaNDs Seminar will be on Monday 13 October 2025 Dr Steven Poulter (Durham University) will present ‘Where are my keys? Probing Vector Trace cells for early Alzheimer’s detection’ (abstract below).
Refreshments will be available in Scafell room (1.05, 1st Floor, Biomedical Research Building, CAV) from 12.00 and the seminar will commence at 12.30pm in the Great Gable meeting room (1.01). Microsoft Teams details are below, though we encourage everyone who can to join in person.
Abstract: Neuroscience is on the verge of a paradigm-defining decade but our understanding of the brain networks involved in memory processes is still quite primitive. One fruitful area involves the study of the movements of rats and signals from brain cells in hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial for memory and often damaged first in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The 2014 Nobel-prize-winning work in rodents (later replicated in humans) revealed the existence of place and grid cells, the brain’s internal GPS able to track where you are and how far you’ve travelled. This likely explains why patients with damage to brain areas containing these brain cells often get lost and go wandering.
Recently, our discovery of a new class of brain cell, the Vector Trace cell (VTC), sheds further light on the function of hippocampus (Poulter et al. 2021, Nature Neuroscience). VTCs track how far away and in what direction objects are located and, crucially, can reflect previously encountered, now removed, objects in their firing activity. A network of VTCs could represent an entire remembered scene, helping one to remember where objects are located.
Given VTCs are found in dorsal subiculum, a subfield of hippocampus providing some of the earliest biomarkers of AD, they could explain, mechanistically, why a very common symptom in early AD is the losing or misplacing of objects, such as door keys or a mobile phone. Thus, VTCs provide a cell-level representation of spatial memory within the brain, a finding that has proved extremely elusive. Armed with the knowledge that VTCs are found in one of the circuits first affected by AD pathology, it makes sense to devise a behavioural task tapping into VTC (dys)function when the first brain changes are occurring but many years prior to the manifestation of other cognitive deficits. By carefully scratching at the earliest pathology, the hypothesis is that our new virtual navigation tests, requiring participants to remember the locations of and vectors from objects, will be more sensitive and specific for detecting hippocampal ageing (data presented) and early AD than current in-clinic, gold-standard cognitive tests.
Steven Poulter is an Assistant Professor at Durham University. After completing a BSc Honours degree in Biosciences, he studied Neuroscience at Durham University (MSc and PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience with Profs Easton and McGregor). He then conducted several postdocs in the labs of Colin Lever (Durham) and Neil Burgess (UCL) working on spatial representation and memory mechanisms, before setting up his own lab in the Psychology Department of Durham University in 2024.