Molecular Foundry Seminar

"Of Mice, Men, and Microscopes: Watching the Brain Dynamics of Motor Control at the Cellular Scale in Behaving Subjects,"

Mark J. Schnitzer, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Departments of Biology and Applied Physics, Stanford University,

Tuesday, December 15th at 1:30 pm, Room 67-3111

Abstract:

A longstanding challenge in neuroscience is to understand how populations of individual neurons and glia contribute to animal behavior and brain disease. Addressing this challenge has been difficult partly due to lack of appropriate brain imaging technology for visualizing cellular properties in awake behaving animals and over long time periods. I will describe two approaches to studying cellular dynamics in the brains of awake behaving mice, one of which also allows time-lapse studies of cells in deep brain areas. Using both approaches we have studied the dynamics of cerebellar Purkinje cells and Bergmann glia and relationships to locomotor behavior. We have also been applying minimally invasive imaging techniques in human subjects for studies of motor control at the cellular scale.