Topic: ion channels

What are the things that draw us to a particular field of science and what is it that keeps us there? For Dr. Bahia, there was a particular attraction to sensory nerves; the monitors of the worlds inside and outside of our bodies. In this talk, Dr. Bahia will outline her career path as a neuroscientist resulting in the title of Research Associate. She will also talk about the longest project she has participated in, 'exploring the role of ion channels in sensory nerves' (rupress.org/jgp/article/147/6/451/43495/The-exceptionally-high-reactivity-of-Cys-621-is)

Our group is interested in discovering design principles that govern the structure and function of neurons and neural circuits. We record from well-defined neurons, mainly in flies’ visual systems, to measure the molecular and cellular factors that determine relevant measures of performance, such as representational capacity, dynamic range and accuracy. We combine this empirical approach with modelling to see how the basic elements of neural systems (ion channels, second messengers systems, membranes, synapses, neurons, circuits and codes) combine to determine performance. We are investigating

Both computational and experimental results in single neurons and small networks demonstrate that very similar network function can result from quite disparate sets of neuronal and network parameters. Using the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system, we study the influence of these differences in underlying structure on differential resilience of individuals to a variety of environmental perturbations, including changes in temperature, pH, potassium concentration and neuromodulation. We show that neurons with many different kinds of ion channels can smoothly move through different mechanisms

Both computational and experimental results in single neurons and small networks demonstrate that very similar network function can result from quite disparate sets of neuronal and network parameters. Using the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system, we study the influence of these differences in underlying structure on differential resilience of individuals to a variety of environmental perturbations, including changes in temperature, pH, potassium concentration and neuromodulation. We show that neurons with many different kinds of ion channels can smoothly move through different mechanisms

Biophysical neuron models provide mechanistic insight about empirically observed phenomena. However, biophysical neuron models are expensive to simulate, thereby limiting the scale of biophysical models, and optimizing their parameters is notoriously difficult, thereby preventing the fitting of biophysical models to physiologically meaningful tasks or datasets (panel a). We built a new toolbox for simulation and inference in neuroscience, Jaxley, which allows to parallelize simulations on (multiple) GPUs and to compute the gradient of simulations with respect to parameters (panel b, c). We use

The functioning of a synapse depends on its accessibility to proteins and, thus, on the localization of protein sources along the dendrite (Westenbroek 2009, Vacher et al. 2008). Therefore, the behaviour of the synapse highly depends on the availability of proteins and ion channels and any perturbation in the localization and availability of these components would lead to a dysfunction of the synapse. Hence, understanding the localization and distribution of ion channels and proteins in the dendrite in relation to the synapse is crucial. Using super-resolution microscopy, Helm et al., 2021 der

Neurons rely on the interplay between dendritic morphology and ion channels to transform synaptic inputs into a sequence of somatic spikes. Detailed biophysical models with active dendrites have been instrumental for exploring this interaction. However, such models can be challenging to understand and validate due to the large number of parameters involved. In this work, we introduce DendroTweaks — a framework designed to illuminate how morpho-electric properties map to dendritic events, and how these dendritic events shape neuronal output. Through its graphical interface, users can access the