a Fish Story

What mysteries about movement can the lamprey help solve?

By Steve Schultz, Comm '98

“You set up your prep. You’ve got your electrode, and you start fishing for cells,” he says. “Some days you have good days and get a lot of data and some days aren’t so good. But you get enough nibbles and enough great catches to excite you to come again the next day, because you’re always learning something new, even something that no one has found before.”

On a great day of research, Buchanan says, he has been able to record a single nerve cell for several hours, allowing him to gather information about the cell’s morphology, pharmacology, electrical properties and patterns of synaptic connectivity.

“Usually a single cell can be recorded in good condition for only short periods of 10 or 20 minutes and, therefore, much of our work is based on a patchwork of partial information on many representative cells,” he says. “To be able to record from a small cell for long periods is valuable and exhilarating.”

Buchanan earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Colorado College in Colorado Springs and a doctoral degree in neural science from Washington University in St. Louis. After serving three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, he joined the Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. His groundbreaking research there with Dr. Sten Grillner, a renowned neurophysiologist who is now director of the institute, led to a landmark article of the lamprey spinal cord published in Science magazine in 1987.

After serving as an instructor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Buchanan brought his research to Marquette. He joined the Department of Biological Sciences in 1989 and has received grants from the National Institutes of Health every year since 1989 to continue his research.

The Wehr Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences’ research has been funded by more than $1.8 million in grants and led to more than 40 publications. And this year, Buchanan’s work was honored when he was awarded the Lawrence G. Haggerty Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Marquette’s highest research award.

He teaches the undergraduate course Neurobiology, the graduate course Cellular Neurophysiology and a
one-credit seminar on how neuronal networks generate behavior. Starting this fall, he will join faculty members from the departments of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Sciences who are teaming up to teach a new sequence of courses supporting Marquette’s expanded doctoral specialization in neuroscience.

Buchanan’s current graduate student, Peter Placas, is investigating the contribution of electrical synapses to locomotor rhythm generation in the lamprey spinal cord. His recent doctoral graduates include Dr. James Einum, who recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bordeaux in France and is starting a second postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Montreal, and Dr. Kathy Quinlan, who is currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.