For Spring 2020 ION seminars are held in virtually at 4:00 p.m. on Thursdays unless otherwise specified.  Seminars are hosted on Zoom and are open to the UO community.  Links to the weekly seminar will be advertized through the ION mailing list and linked on the day of the seminar below.  Contact Jenna Penny for scheduling speakers at seminars @ uoneuro.uoregon.edu 

Upcoming Institute of Neuroscience Seminar | Thursday, April 30th, 2020 – 12 pm PST

Andreas Schaefer, PhD

Group Leader - Division of Neurophysiology, Francis Crick Institute, London, UK
Faculty - Department of Neuroscience Physiology and Pharmacology, University College London

“From Synchrotrons to Microwires – a broad approach to sensory processing”

Host: Matt Smear
Link & meeting information available here no later than Thursday morning.
For more information and support for using the Zoom platform visit UOregon Zoom.

Abstract: In this talk I will present our approach to dissecting information processing in the mammalian brain. It will be broadly structured in three parts – olfaction, large-scale neuronal recordings, volume EM and synchrotrons.
Odours are transported in turbulent plumes resulting locally in highly fluctuating odour concentration. Yet, whether mammals can make use of the ensuing temporal structure to extract information about the olfactory environment remains unknown. Here, I will show that using a variety of engineering approaches including an automated operant conditioning system we demonstrate that mice can reliably discriminate the correlation structure of odours at frequencies of up to 40 Hz.  Consistent with this finding, output neurons in the olfactory bulb show segregated responses depending on the correlation of odour stimuli with populations of 10s of neurons sufficient to reach behavioural performance. This work thus demonstrates that mammals can perceive temporal structure in odour stimuli at surprisingly fast timescales. This in turn might be useful for key behavioural challenges such as odour source separation, figure-ground separation or odour localisation.
I will then briefly introduce technology that we have developed that combines bundles of microwires with CMOS recording chips to allow for scalable, minimally invasive recordings from large numbers of neurons deep in the brain in vivo from sheets of neurons such as the output layer of the olfactory bulb. Finally, to dissect the mechanistic basis of information processing in the olfactory bulb I will present our approaches combining volume electron microscopy and synchrotron CT imaging with functional 2p imaging in vivo to link function to structure over mm length scales. - Andreas Schaefer