Topic: neural diversity

Claude Desplan is a Silver Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at NYU. He was born in Algeria and was trained at Ecole Normale Supérieure St. Cloud, France. He received his DSc at INSERM in Paris in 1983 and joined Pat O’Farrell at UCSF as a postdoc. There he demonstrated that the homeodomain, a conserved signature of many developmental genes, is a DNA binding motif. Currently, Dr. Desplan works at NYU where he investigates the generation of neural diversity using the Drosophila visual system.

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through the development of artificial neural networks (ANNs), has significantly benefited from insights gained from neuroscience. This progress has enhanced the replication of complex cognitive tasks such as vision and natural language processing (1,2). However, ANNs still struggle with continual learning, adaptable knowledge transfer, robustness, and resource efficiency - capabilities that biological systems handle seamlessly (3–8). Neuromodulators, the chemical messengers that target neurons and synapses in specific brain regions,

Diversity exists all throughout biology where it plays an important role in maintaining robustness and stability [1]. The same is true of the brain [2], as has become increasingly apparent in recent years with the accumulation of datasets of unparalleled resolution [3,4]. These datasets show heterogeneity in the brain to be widespread, spanning cells, circuits and system dynamics, marking it as an unavoidable component of neuronal composition. Recent experiments found that decline in biophysical heterogeneity amongst neurons may accompany pathological states such as epilepsy [5]. While heterog