Most of my designs are just the central cartoon figure. This is basically laziness. I kid myself that it’s all to do with simplicity of the main image, not wanting to add unnecessary detail or just that I can’t draw backgrounds. Really though it’s because creating an effective background, simple or detailed, takes a lot […]
This design came about by accident. I’d been working for a long time on a detailed picture of an astrocyte in a garage as an analogy for synaptic repair. The challenge I set myself was to do a full composition, not just a cartoon cell. Backgrounds are not my strong point. In one version I’d […]
This cartoon is a close relative of Neurons vs Glia, I’d been using Superglue as a tongue in cheek slide title in the same talk. One time when I was reviewing them a superhero glial cell flew out at me. Normally I don’t draw cells with proper hands. Partly because hands are hard to draw […]
We used to have lab meetings in a room that had a printout on the wall of one of those grids of how post-docs, technicians, PIs, PhD students are viewed by each other. That got me thinking, on a smaller scale, of the same opinions played out between neuronal and glial biologists. Everyone thinks of […]
Synapses are the connections between nerve cells and the number and density of them is linked to how networks form in brain. Microglia are cells that patrol the brain to remove debris and foreign objects such as pathogens. They also modify neuronal networks by nibbling away synaptic contacts, hence the term ‘synaptic pruning’. This isn’t […]