Morven Cameron

Best costume I’ve seen this year.

I am hoping a break from the grindstone will reinvigorate me and I will get back to the fun retinal biologist I used to be 👁️ I have no plans to leave academic but we will see what happens….

I will have a much needed rest, and focus on publishing some of the awesome science I have done over the last few years (but haven’t had time to write up!). I know many academics are feeling the same way right now. Things have changed in academia and it’s not as fun as it used to be.

After 15 years at Western Sydney University I will be taking voluntary redundancy at the end of this year. I have worked with some really amazing people here over the years. The workload has got too much though and all I do is work. I will remain an adjunct fellow and keep my lab going.

And one of just my lab

Drone footage from the Kioloa Neuroscience Colloquium 2025 last weekend. An awesome conference promoting students and early career researchers organised by the wonderful John Bekkers of ANU.

New ocular dissection skill unlocked - hyaloid vessels! This was DIFFICULT. It’s like dissecting a spider web, only possible after an extensive tutorial by Shruti Vermaraju from the Lang Lab.

Had a great time in Cincinnati, off to Massachusetts now for FASEB.

Just arrived in the USA, it’s been a while! Visiting Emory tomorrow, then Cincinnati Children’s later in the week. Then a week of FASEB conference starting Sunday. Looking forward to 2 weeks of intense science chats :-)

Will you be at FASEB this year? Need to discuss RPE cells with you!

I’m not at ARVO this year, but my fantastic PhD student is! Make sure you check out her poster today in the “Inner retina circuits and function” session at 3pm :-)

Ionotropic dopamine receptors!? How cool.

Me: “I am interested in measuring something in mouse pups at postnatal day 2”, every breeding pair of mice in our facility: “Let’s always give birth on a Friday” - absolute bastards.

Nice melanopsin driven constriction to a bright stimulus in an rd/rd (rodless coneless) mouse.

A long weekend of building, fiddling, breaking things, fixing things, more fiddling and then testing: Cameron lab mouse pupillometer 2.0 is working 👍 (to be fair, pupillometer 1.0 was a cardboard box, so it couldn’t be worse 😂).

Sam Webster gave a great talk at Western Sydney Uni last week on anatomy teaching. His talk walked us through the evolution of online resources over the last ~30 years, from dial up internet to the present day “inshitification” of the internet! Check him out if you teach anatomy.

Looks amazing!

Moniliform deformation of retinal ganglion cells by formaldehyde-based fixatives - PubMed Protocols for characterizing cellular phenotypes commonly use chemical fixatives to preserve anatomical features, mechanically stabilize tissue, and stop physiological responses. Formaldehyde, diluted...

For retinal people, this is of interest and we find it works well: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25283775/

Love this, I think there is a lot of morphology we don’t see because of fixation.

Dopaminergic amacrine cells from retina stained with antibodies against tyrosine hydroxylase. The images are greyscale and demonstrate wide field amacrine cells from the retina.

Dopaminergic amacrine cells from retina stained with antibodies against tyrosine hydroxylase. The images are greyscale and demonstrate wide field amacrine cells from the retina.

Dopaminergic amacrine cells from retina stained with antibodies against tyrosine hydroxylase. The images are greyscale and demonstrate wide field amacrine cells from the retina.

Dopaminergic Amacrine Cells

bryanwjones.com/2020/06/dopa...

#SciArt #retina

Early vision Neuroscience community, Vol 1

We are talking eyes, retinas, and some of the more ancestral bits of visual brains. No species restrictions. List is close to full, will start building Vol 2 before too long

Addition requests, please see link in the below thread

go.bsky.app/BotZr1g

Very interesting! We should probably talk, I have a student working on Parkinson’s…

Really?! That’s awesome. Did you get it? Lane Brown and Samer Hattar are working DAC->ipRGC modulation at the moment in the mouse.

Dopaminergic amacrines and ipRGCs (M1s specifically) - and look how much they are wrapped up in each other 😍 #accessoryONsublayer

Obligatory Australian spider pic: #huntsman #notdeadly but #incrediblyterrifying

I will admit I was never very “good” at Twitter, but I really see the utility of being able to share stuff that historically would only be talked about over drinks at conferences.

….and how all of those are related! I am originally from Scotland but now call Australia my home; it’s pretty great here…except for the spiders, and lack of research funding! For attention, here is a pic of the extensive dopaminergic cell plexus (green; DAPI - blue) in the bottom of the INL.

I will introduce myself here since lots of people have now moved! My lab is at Western Sydney University, Australia and we work mostly on retinal dopamine release, however I have broad interests in retinal circuitry, adaptation, circadian rhythms, gap junctions, melanopsin and retinal development.

Discussions underway to create an online resource of antibodies that work, and don’t work! This should actually be supported by funding bodies, I wonder how much public money is wasted on antibodies that don’t work? (e.g. we have 5 different c-fos’s- only 2 work!).

How about a shared online spreadsheet that people can add to and update? This would be such a great resource! e.g. PhosphoSolutions RBPMS used to be good, but their recent lot doesn’t work for us.