Computational Biology ePosters

Many behaviors demand a balance between exploitation, which requires reliability, and exploration, which involves flexibility. In cortical circuits, much work has emphasized how attractor dynamics generate reliable behavior through the convergence of a network to specialized activity patterns for specific decisions…

Inhibitory interneurons account for 20-30\% of neurons in the human neocortex (Markram et al. 2004) and separate into distinct cell-types (Gouwens et al. 2020, Lee et al. 2023). However, the functional role of these inhibitory cell-types is not yet well understood, especially not in the intact human neocortical…

To study how motor circuits control bodies in robust, adaptive, and flexible ways, we often break down the complex control system into individual components to be studied in isolation. However, it is increasingly recognized that we need to consider biomechanically realistic models when interpreting the neural…

Recent years have witnessed a growing body of experimental evidence highlighting the active role of glial cells in modulating neuronal dynamics. Glial cells, including astrocytes and microglia, have been found to influence various aspects of neuronal function, such as regulating neurotransmitter concentrations and ion…

Animals encode sensory stimuli with precisely timed activity across modalities. For example, mice can rapidly recognize odors, independent of their concentration, based on complex spatiotemporal patterns of mitral and tufted cell (MTC) activity in the olfactory bulb. Yet, it remains unknown how sequential MTC activity…

Freezing is an active state of immobility which is used by many species as a form of defense in response to threat. In drosophila, previous work has identified factors – such as the amount of motion from surrounding flies – that regulate the probability and duration of freezing, but we currently lack a mechanistic…

Understanding how neural circuits process and interpret information can be challenging, as connectivity and activity continuously influence each other. Activity-dependent synaptic plasticity shapes and refines this intricate relationship. Connectivity motifs, small subnetworks of a few neurons, have been found to play…

The study of animal locomotion and neuromechanical control offers valuable insights for advancing research in neuroscience, biomechanics, and robotics. We have developed FARMS (Framework for Animal and Robot Modeling and Simulation), an open-source, interdisciplinary framework, designed to facilitate access to…

The connectivity network in the brain forms the basis for its functionality. Past studies have focused on the use of random (Erdos-Renyi, ER) networks or simple distant-dependent connectivity rules to model biological neural networks (BNNs). However, experimental data shows that specific network motifs are either…

The mammalian striatum is critically involved in perceptual decision-making, where disrupted dopamine transmission leads to perceptual disturbances such as hallucinations. The precise mechanism by which striatal dopamine contributes to perceptual decisions is not known. We investigated this by developing a circuit…

Our ability to form and retrieve memories relies on a network of connected brain regions. In particular, neuronal ensembles across regions form distributed memory engrams that have structural and functional connectivity. However, the computational principles underlying the distributed nature of memory remain unclear.…

Complex dexterous movements, such as reach-and-grasp, are driven by the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions. Each region contributes unique computations while interacting with others to control the movements. To understand the neural principles underlying this behavior across different brain regions, we…

Most walking animals can maintain motor control after limb injury or amputation, where coordinating movements of a drastically altered body requires dynamic interactions between the nervous system, the biomechanics of the body, and the physical environment. Until recently, it has been challenging to link neural and…

Recent studies have demonstrated that the inferior temporal (IT) cortex of macaques encodes various attributes of visual objects, including identity, size, position, and pose (Hong et al., 2016). However, the representation of object depth within IT has remained relatively unexplored. In this study, we investigate…

Identifying and characterizing the wiring rules of neural circuits is critical for our understanding of the computations that they perform and how they learn. The reconstruction of complete connectivity maps of neural networks at the single cell resolution make the quantitative study of their design principles…

Healthy cerebral cortex function requires complex neuronal population activity with a diverse repertoire of timescales, from fleeting response to sensory input ($\sim$10-100 ms), to execution of complex body movements ($\sim 100-1000 ms$), to even longer timescales of working memory ($\sim 1-10 s$). How does cortex…

Advances in simultaneous recordings of large numbers of neurons have driven significant interest in structures of neural population activity such as dimensionality. A key question is how these dynamic features arise mechanistically and their relationship to circuit connectivity. It was previously proposed to use the…

Strongly interconnected neuronal populations are thought to be a substrate for memory in the brain. Dynamic connectivity relies on plasticity rules to adjust synapses, enabling learning and neural circuit formation. Networks with only excitatory synaptic plasticity can become unstable due to runaway excitation,…

A growing number of studies indicate the possible involvement of astrocytes in triggering or modulating neurovascular coupling (NVC), i.e. the local dilation of blood vessels in the brain in response to neuronal activity [1]. Their endfeet, surrounding arterioles and capillaries, are ideally positioned to deliver…

In a recent experiment, Shamash et al. demonstrated that mice spontaneously adopt a subgoal strategy when escaping to a shelter hidden behind a wall. Their optimized trajectory, learned in 1-3 trials, involves running straight to a subgoal located at the edge of the wall, and then to the shelter. Strikingly, even if…

Odor naming is considered as a particularly challenging task. In free odor naming scenarios people often fail to respond with any linguistic label to certain odors they smell, resulting in what is called an omission (i.e., a lack of response). The cognitive demands and the nature of interactions between olfaction and…

AMPA receptors (AMPARs) mediate fast excitatory neurotransmission and participate in memory formation. Synaptic strength is proportional to the number of AMPARs in the postsynaptic membrane. Previous models of AMPA receptor trafficking can explain their fast, brief incorporation in dendritic spines after LTP induction…

Advancements in machine learning have drastically improved our ability to fit biophysical models of neural systems. We present here a fully-differentiable, biophysical model of the mouse retina that is primed for gradient-based optimization. Our model is based on the Jaxley software library (Deistler et al. 2024,…

Synfire chains have been postulated as a model for stable propagation of synchronous spikes through the cortical networks [1,2,3]. Synfire-chain-like activity can also be found in spiking artificial neural networks trained for a classification task [4]. Understanding the mechanism for generating such activity would…