Topic: ChR2

During visually guided behaviours, hundreds of milliseconds or more can elapse between stimulus onset and a behavioural response. How spikes occurring at different times and in different brain areas are read out to generate perception and guide behaviour remains elusive. To explore temporal relationships between sensory input, neuronal spiking, and behaviour, we recently adapted reverse correlation approaches for optogenetic inhibition. We delivered white noise pulse trains of optogenetic stimulation to excite ChR2-expressing inhibitory neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) or superior col

Odors evoke distinct patterns of neural activity across different concentrations, both at the input level of olfactory sensory neurons (OSN) and glomeruli, as well as the next level, mitral/tufted cells (MTCs). What features of these patterns carry invariant information about odor identity and what are the neural mechanisms defining these features? To address this question, we designed an all-optical system to monitor the activity of many glomeruli and MT cells with high temporal resolution and developed an optogenetic method for establishing functional connectivity between glomeruli and MTCs.

Genetic reprogramming techniques have been used with increasing success to generate human neurons from adult somatic cells. Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived neurons have been shown as an effective way to investigate normal and pathological neuronal development. Additionally, transcription factor-based direct conversion of fibroblasts into induced neurons (iNs) has been established. Such iNs have been shown to retain age-related epigenetic information of the donor and therefore are viewed as a more appropriate model system for studying human neuronal aging and related pathologies. I

This study addresses the question of how previous choices affect the interaction between the basal ganglia and anterolateral motor cortex (ALM) during a cued auditory dual choice task in mice. We did Ca imaging in the ALM and used ChR2 for excitation of neurons in the indirect pathway. We discovered that optogenetic manipulation's impact varied with the animal's past decisions. Notably, trials following the same choice were less influenced by optogenetic stimulation, suggesting a form of neural adaptation or memory effect within the circuit. Our analysis shows distinct activity patterns in the