【Seminar】"Seeing memories through the looking glass: towards brain-wide imaging of memory circuits and their impairments" by Dr. Simon R Schultz
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Talk title: "Seeing memories through the looking glass: towards brain-wide imaging of memory circuits and their impairments"
We have learned much about brain function over the past 100 years from the study of single neurons and small neural ensembles. However, making further progress on understanding systems level brain functions such as cognition and memory will require us to monitor the activity of neuronal circuits which span many widely distributed brain areas. Similarly, understanding how neurodegenerative disease leads to impairments in cognition will require large-scale, single-cell resolution brain imaging. In this talk, I will describe our work towards these goals. Firstly, I will describe our work using an air-lifted mouse behavioural platform to image calcium signals from populations of (hundreds of) neurons in hippocampal subregion CA1 while mice run around a circular track, in a familiar or novel environment. Examining a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease AD), we found that neurons in AD mice had elevated baseline firing during non-running periods, but were less able to increase their firing rates to respond to changes in spatial location or speed – they have a progressive (with age) impairment in dynamic range. I will also show an extension to a new head-fixed spatial working memory task we developed, which we find to be very sensitive to AD genotype and age; as well as showing information (bitrate) deficits in individual neurons, we see a special deficit in the performance of so-called “splitter cells”, which may play an important role in performing cognitive tasks, and which may be particularly vulnerable to circuit disruption. Finally, I will describe the current state of our attempts to scale our approach up by using mesoscopic two-photon microscopy to image the activity of many thousands of neurons across widespread brain areas simultaneously during cognitive tasks.
Simon R Schultz is Professor of Neurotechnology in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, and Director of the Imperial Centre of Excellence in Neurotechnology. He is also Affiliate Faculty at the Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, and has been a visiting researcher at the MRC Brain Network Dynamics Unit in Oxford and at RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Tokyo. His first degrees were in Physics, Applied Mathematics and Electrical & Computer Engineering (from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia), followed by a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering at Sydney University, then completing a DPhil in Computational Neuroscience at Oxford University in 1998. This was followed by postdoctoral stints in experimental neuroscience with Tony Movshon at New York University, and Michael Häusser at UCL. He joined Imperial College in 2004. He is well known for work on neural coding, ranging from the development of new algorithms based on information theory and graph theory to analyse neurophysiological data, to the use of two-photon calcium imaging to study the coding of sensory and cognitive variables in the activity of populations of neurons. His contributions to neurotechnology include novel multiphoton scanning algorithms, behavioural readout apparatus, algorithms for processing two-photon calcium imaging movies, and two-photon targeted robotically automated patch clamp electrophysiology. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). His current research is focused on using mesoscopic multiphoton imaging to study brain mechanisms of memory consolidation, and associated with this, the development of neurotechnology for memory enhancement.
Seminar hosted by Fukunaga Unit
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