A few weeks ago, I had a chance to attend a symposium organized by the Columbia Genome Center’s facility for high-throughput screening. One of the speakers was Clarissa Waites, an assistant professor at Columbia University Medical Center. I just posted an article based on her very interesting presentation, which focused on her efforts to use high-throughput screens to identify molecules that can target synapses, the electrochemical interfaces that transmit signals between neurons in the brain. Her project is ongoing, but Waites believes it could potentially discover ways to track the loss of synapses in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and possibly even to deliver drugs or nanoscale sensors to these critical junctions. Read the article, Imaging Synapses Using Fluorescent Small Molecule Probes.