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The British Neuroscience Association's Festival of Neuroscience 2019 put improving research practice and methods at the forefront. In this article, the University of Bath's Naomi Heffer takes a look over why the BNA is promoting research "credibility", and what it means for the neuroscience community.

At the British Neuroscience Association's Festival of Neuroscience 2019, we pulled aside one of the BNA's credibility board, Dr Verena Heise to ask her about credibility in neuroscience, how she became involved in promoting it, and how other players in research can help advance the credibility cause.

Deciphering the first complete sequence of the human genome in 2003 required a combined effort of scientists from 20 institutions and $3 billion of funding. Over the last decade, whole-exome sequencing (WES) established itself as a method that successfully balances cost and the output of useful data for diagnostic or research applications. Here, we look at how WES is used in both the laboratory and the clinic, and why it is a preferred method of choice in such areas.

The specificity of antibody binding is incredibly important for many research disciplines, yet sourcing the best antibody for your research can be a challenge. This is partly because not all suppliers validate their antibodies sufficiently. How much of a problem is this?

The human brain sequesters many mysteries. How does cognitive development take place? How does it help us learn? What causes brain diseases? An exciting venture involving researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Princeton University is preparing to unleash a $500-million supercomputer, dubbed Aurora, in the pursuit of these answers.

A system capable of translating brain activity into synthesised speech by decoding the movements of muscles involved in vocalisation has shown its potential in a proof-of-concept experiment conducted by researchers at the University of California San Francisco.

A significant minority of major depressive disorder patients don’t respond to currently available antidepressant medication. A newly approved treatment, based on the "club drug" ketamine, could change that. In a session at the British Neuroscience Association’s Festival of Neuroscience 2019, the potential mechanisms of ketamine’s antidepressant action were put under examination.

When developing diagnostic tests or evaluating results, it is important to understand how reliable those tests and therefore the results you are obtaining are. By using samples of known disease status, values such as sensitivity and specificity can be calculated that allow you to evaluate just that.

Running in parallel with advances in 3D cell culture is the growing use of human cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Researchers are interested in testing drugs in the most physiologically relevant models possible, so it was only a matter of time before these two approaches converged – providing optimized systems for disease modeling and drug toxicity testing.

Once viewed as competing to be the best way of doing in vivo neuroscience, optical and electrical recording techniques are now being embraced as complementary methods in the quest to understand the brain.