By Diana Kenney / MBL News
“There was no way we could not collaborate,” says Dragomir Milovanovic of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, referring to Senior Scientist Jennifer Morgan of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL).
When the two first met in 2018, Milovanovic was exploring how condensates -- liquid-like droplets that spontaneously form inside cells -- behave in the nervous system, especially at the synapse, the important contact point where two nerve cells communicate. Morgan, meanwhile, was studying how the synapse malfunctions in devastating diseases such as Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia.
Milovanovic’s studies were in vitro (in glass) – in artificial synapses built in a lab dish. Morgan’s were in vivo (in a living organism) – in the sea lamprey, which boasts giant synapses in some of its neurons.
“We clicked very well, very quickly,” says Milovanovic. “The secret of our success is our complementarity. We are interested in the same questions, but we take different approaches.”
“It’s like cosmic forces brought us together,” says Morgan, who first invited Milovanovic to the MBL in 2018 to give a seminar in the Eugene Bell Center, which she directs.
Of course, it helps that the MBL is Grand Central for the study of condensates. First observed during the 2008 MBL Physiology course, condensates are now known to form in all cells of the body and to regulate many critical cellular processes. They’ve also been implicated in the development of many serious diseases, including neurodegenerative disease.
Milovanovic’s in vitro approach “is very powerful to study how condensates form – the so-called liquid-liquid phase transitions,” he says. To translate this understanding to a living nervous system, “the sea lamprey synapse is absolutely second to none, in terms of its size and the imaging approaches you can use for visualizing its substructures,” he says.