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Archive by tag | cerebellum

10 May 2012 | 21:24 BST

“There is no spoon…”: Paralyzed fish navigates virtual environment while we watch its brain

Posted by Noah Gray | Categories: New in Nature, Noah Gray

Overlaid on the micrograph of the fish is a slice of its brain measured with a laser scanning microscope, in which single neurons are visible.

Sometimes an experiment will just reach off the page and slap you in the face, demanding attention. This happens to me every so often and I must admit, our latest paper from the lab of Florien Engert induced such an experience. There have been several cool, technical tours-de-force (is that proper grammar??) over the last few years involving different creatures navigating in a virtual environment while neuronal activity was monitored. These include a mouse running on a spherical treadmill, as well as a fly marching along a similar treadmill-style ball. But in these examples, having the subject head-fixed (for the stability of recordings in the brain, either with electrodes or through imaging) was moderately non-intrusive since walking motions were independent of the head. The same can’t be said for the subject in this latest example of a virtual reality navigator: a wriggling, swimming fish. Therefore, a more creative solution had to be sought and in a paper published online yesterday, Ahrens, Engert and colleagues decided that paralysis was the way to go in order to follow the neural activity of this navigating fish.  Read more

Tags:

  • adaptation
  • calcium imaging
  • cerebellum
  • decoding
  • motor learning
  • Nature
  • navigation
  • neural circuits
  • neural plasticity
  • neurons
  • neuroscience
  • virtual reality
  • zebrafish

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25 Jan 2012 | 18:01 GMT

Timely inhibition

Posted by I-han Chou | Categories: I-han Chou, New in Nature

Image: Tamily Weissman

This week’s paper is by Abigail Person and Indira Raman and is about information transmission between two cell populations in the cerebellum – purkinje cells in the cortex and their targets in the deep nuclei. Purkinje cells are justifiably famous for their spectacular anatomy  which enables integration of thousands of inputs. This paper, however, is about their output and how these exclusively GABAergic cells control the activity of downstream neurons. Conventional wisdom holds that there should be a straightforward inverse relationship between the firing rate of the two populations, but this has not always been observed. Person and Raman present a new solution based on spike timing – when purkinje cells spike asynchronously, their targets are inhibited (as expected), but when they spike synchronously, nuclear neurons can spike during the gaps in inhibition and end up time locking their activity to their inputs.  Read more

Tags:

  • cerebellum
  • Nature
  • neuroscience
  • purkinje
  • spikes

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About this blog

Action Potential is a forum operated by neuroscience editors at Nature for the entire neuroscience community. We'll discuss what's new and exciting in science, be it in our journals or elsewhere, as well as science policy and publishing and provide updates from major meetings. Although we provide the opportunity to comment as a service to the community, we do not endorse all viewpoints represented here. To contact the contributors directly with confidential questions or suggestions for future entries, please e-mail n.gray@us.nature.com.
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