Josien de Bie

Have you ever noticed that men and women are different? if you haven’t.. maybe go google that first (I am not taking responsibility for any disturbing images you might find). If you have, congratulations, you are now with me at the forefront of science.

We are finding out that men and women are different in the way they get sick. The kind of diseases they get, when they get them, even how long they live. What we don’t know, is why.

So, what makes us men and women in the first place?
Basically, our sex hormones; oestrogen and testosterone and the like.

So what do sex hormones do to the brain? We don't know. And that's what I want to find out.

Our group works on tryptophan metabolism. Tryptophan is an essential building block for our body's molecules. We can't produce it, we have to get it from our food.

(thankfully, this is delicious, we get tryptophan from cheese, eggs even asparagus!). 

Tryptophan can be used in lots of ways, it can be a building block for serotonin, which influences your mood, or melatonin, which  influences sleep, it can be a source of energy for the immune system.. Or it can be turned into kynurenine and further metabolized in the kynurenine pathway.

The products of this pathway have effects on the immune system and on the brain (also, the immune system has a huge effect on the brain). We know that when people get sick, the activity of this pathway changes. We also know that in a lot of the diseases in which the pathway changes, there is a big gender difference. For instance, we know that the kynurenine pathway is changed in patients with Parkinson''s disease. We also know that more men than women get Parkinson's. What we don't know, is why.

There is quite a bit of evidence that the kynurenine pathway plays are part a lot of diseases. We also know that sex hormones and gender are a factor in these same diseases. What we need to know is how the two are connected.

I want to spend my waking hours finding out.

We need to know what sex hormones do to the kynurenine pathway in our brains. Not only to help develop treatments for when we're sick, but to better understand what makes us tick.

A look in the Genderbrain lab

As shown by our workometer If we reach the $3000 target, I can go to a big tryptophan conference called ISTRY and  tell all tryptophan researchers how important it is to take gender into account. The great thing is, that the workometer is a sliding scale, more funds will always equal more work.

We've already done some preliminary work with some pretty exciting results. That means we have everything set up, all the expertise, equipment and protocols in place. The brain cells are there, the jars of hormones are there, we're all ready to go.

Seriously, we are so close. But if we can't fund this next year, the project is going straight to the back burner. A lot of expertise will be lost, the jars of hormones will go off (yes, that happens) and by the time someone will remember to take an interest and start it up again everything will have to be started from scratch.

Please don't let that happen.

Another year will set us up to compete for government grants, hopefully enabling us to keep going under our own steam. This is important work for all areas of study where gender is a factor (google it, seriously,there are SO many). And it needs to be done..basically yesterday.

So please pledge, and share this campaign (http://pozi.be/genderbrain), together, we can do this!

If we knew what was going to happen, it wouldn't be research.

Sometimes the machine for spectral analysis (hplc/gcms) breaks down, sometimes our cells don't want to grow, sometimes an effect that we were sure was there, just isn't.
But that's what makes it science. 
When the bad things happen, we raise funds to fix the machine, re-examine our growing methods, draw our conclusions and try something else. 

We just keep on working our 60 hour weeks, evenings and weekends and just keep on keeping on.