About this blog

This blog. Epilepsies or seizure disorders are common diseases of the brain. Many types of epilepsies have a genetic etiology. Finding these genes and characterizing them will lead to insights about the physiology of epilepsies and -hopefully- novel treatment options. In our blog “Beyond the Ion Channel”, we try to make our research more understandable, digestable and interpretable. We would like to share and discuss recent findings in epilepsy genetics on this blog, which is usually updated three times a week. We hope that it will be useful primarily for researchers in neurogenetics, be they students, clinicians or allied health professionals. We usually highlight major papers in our Twitter feed and will summarize important publications on this blog. As of June 2014, Beyond the Ion Channel has become the official blog of the Genetics Commission of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE).

Opinions. The Wednesday posts are approved by the ILAE Genetics Commission and are indicated as such. Other than this, all opinions on this blog are our own and do not represent any of the institutions we are affiliated with.

Who we are. These, amongst other researchers, are the main people writing on the Beyond the Ion Channel.

helbig_9909_small copyIngo Helbig. Trying to find the balance between patient care, research, family and blogging, Ingo is a child neurologist and epilepsy genetics researcher. He went to medical school in Heidelberg and Mannheim, Germany, and Lexington, Kentucky, USA. He trained at the Epilepsy Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia, and was Assistant Professor at the Department of Neuropediatics, Kiel, Germany, and co-project leader of EuroEPINOMICS-RES from 2011 until June 2014. As of 2014, Ingo is member of the ILAE Genetics Commission and has recently transferred to the Division of Neurology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, while retaining strong ties to his research group in Kiel. Ingo loves spending the remainder of his spare time with his wife Katie and his two children. You can also follow Ingo on Twitter.

 

RK4Roland Krause. Working at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine – the information hub for the EuroEPINOMICS project COGIE – Roland is a bioinformatician with an undergraduate degree in biotechnological engineering (HS Mannheim) and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Heidelberg. His postdoc was in computational biology at the MPI for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, shared with the computer science and math department of the Free University Berlin. You can follow his personal Twitter feed. He has a life too.

Like the idea? We hope that this blog meets your interests and will help you stay up to date with the most recent developments in the field of neurogenetics.

Why this blog. Remember that time when we didn’t have email? Most people can’t, as email has become such an important part of our everyday lives. The same will possibly be true for blogs. Some scientific blogs have already advanced from niche products to blockbusters. We hope that our blog will help the community to stay up to date. You can subscribe to the blog directly or to “The Channelopathist“, our weekly epilepsy genetics newsletter.