Samantha Walsh, MLS, MA (She/her/hers)
Manager of Information & Education Services
Lily Martin, MLIS (She/her/hers)
Reference & Instruction Librarian
In early May, Levy Librarians Lily Martin & Samantha Walsh attended the Medical Library Association Conference 2022: Reconnect, Renew, Reflect in New Orleans. The annual conference was held in person for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. 575 Medical Librarians from around the country met to discuss emerging trends, research, and reflections on medical librarianship. Levy Librarians who did not attend the in-person conference were able to attend virtually and view all posters and research slides from NYC!
Lily & Samantha presented a poster on their work with first year medical students entitled, “Leveraging Google Forms to Promote Student Engagement in the Virtual Library Classroom.” As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, all library instruction at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai transitioned to virtual. This transition posed a challenge in terms of student engagement during required library classes. Lily & Samantha’s poster documented their efforts to redesign a first year session on EndNote. They created a virtual session that taught Academic Integrity concepts as well as EndNote functionality, organized by a Google Form that students completed throughout the session. The poster focused on the success of using a Google Form to keep students engaged and assess learning in the virtual environment. Many medical librarians who stopped to discuss the poster reflected on the difficulties keeping students engaged with this content and were excited to try the Google Form method!
Overall, the conference was a fun and exciting way to connect with medical librarians from around the country, as well as those local to NYC! Lily and Samantha attended sessions on negotiating with vendors, assessment in library instruction, and critical theory’s applications to library practice.
Each month Levy Library showcases the achievements of Mount Sinai faculty and researchers by highlighting an article and its altmetrics. Altmetrics are alternative measures of impact that capture non-traditional data like abstract views, article downloads, and social media activity. Our altmetrics data is provided by the PlumX platform.
This month we highlight TDP-43 loss and ALS-risk SNPs drive mis-splicing and depletion of UNC13A. This article was written in part by Jack Humphrey PhD, Dale Lange MD, Towfique Raj PhD, Daniel MacGowan MD, and John F. Crary MD, PhD.
ABSTRACT
Variants of UNC13A, a critical gene for synapse function, increase the risk of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia1,2,3, two related neurodegenerative diseases defined by mislocalization of the RNA-binding protein TDP-434,5. Here we show that TDP-43 depletion induces robust inclusion of a cryptic exon in UNC13A, resulting in nonsense-mediated decay and loss of UNC13A protein. Two common intronic UNC13A polymorphisms strongly associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia risk overlap with TDP-43 binding sites. These polymorphisms potentiate cryptic exon inclusion, both in cultured cells and in brains and spinal cords from patients with these conditions. Our findings, which demonstrate a genetic link between loss of nuclear TDP-43 function and disease, reveal the mechanism by which UNC13A variants exacerbate the effects of decreased TDP-43 function. They further provide a promising therapeutic target for TDP-43 proteinopathies.
View this article's PlumX profile here