Nina Short and Max Butler were undergraduates when they were awarded a Child Health Research Summer Internship and Wellcome Biomedical Vacation Studentship, respectively. They are now joint first authors on the following paper which reports the work they completed in Dr Gabriel Galea's lab. The last author in the paper is Gabriel Galea and the other authors are also from the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.
The study focusses on the role of the enzyme Rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) enclosing the posterior neuropore (PNP) in the neural tube. The main finding from the study is that ROCK dependent apical constriction compensates for the PNP widening effects of the inter-kinetic nuclear migration to enable progression of closure of the neural tube.
There is also a first person interview with Nina and Max published in the same edition of the journal.