18Apr 2024 by Admin
“Drugs of abuse hijack a mesolimbic pathway that processes homeostatic need” in Science

“Drugs of abuse hijack a mesolimbic pathway that processes homeostatic need” in Science

News
We are excited to share that our paper entitled "Drugs of abuse hijack a mesolimbic pathway that processes homeostatic need" has been published in Science.Drugs of abuse produce pleasurable feelings and reinforce consummatory behavior directed toward their acquisition. These same properties are characteristic of natural rewards that satisfy innate needs, such as food or water. Decades of research has shown that brain systems processing natural rewards are also impacted by drugs of abuse at the physiological, circuit, cellular, and molecular levels. These findings raise the hypothesis that drugs of abuse cause addiction by “hijacking” a common reward pathway, ultimately promoting drug intake while curbing other healthy goals. However, the specific neural substrates for such a shared reward pathway remain unidentified.In this paper we identified the nucleus accumbens (NAc) as a…
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04Apr 2024 by Admin

Unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number

Optical Neurotechnology
Our paper entitled “Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number” has been published in Neuron. The brain’s remarkable properties arise from collective activity of millions of neurons. Widespread application of dimensionality reduction to multi-neuron recordings implies that neural dynamics can be approximated by low-dimensional “latent” signals reflecting neural computations. However, what would be the biological utility of such a redundant and metabolically costly encoding scheme and what is the appropriate resolution and scale of neural recording to understand brain function? Imaging the activity of one million neurons at cellular resolution and near-simultaneously across mouse cortex, we demonstrate an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number. While half of the neural variance lies within sixteen behavior-related dimensions, we find this unbounded scaling…
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26Mar 2024 by Admin

We Welcome Our New Postdoc Nikita Kulachenkov

News
Nikita received his Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics from ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia where he worked on structure related optical switching in metal-organic frameworks. Most notably, he developed optical/PXRD methods for materials characterization, using table-top optics, fiber-optics, lasers, spectroscopy analysis. Now he will begin developing a novel type of miniaturized imaging system which combines high-speed multiphoton methods into the design. Congratulations and welcome to the team!
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07Mar 2024 by Admin
New Article on bioRxiv: “Whole-brain neural substrates of behavioral variability in the larval zebrafish”

New Article on bioRxiv: “Whole-brain neural substrates of behavioral variability in the larval zebrafish”

News
We are happy to announce that a new manuscript entitled “Whole-brain neural substrates of behavioral variability in the larval zebrafish” has been uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. Animals engaged in naturalistic behavior can exhibit a large degree of behavioral variability even under sensory invariant conditions. Such behavioral variability can include not only variations of the same behavior, but also variability across qualitatively different behaviors driven by divergent cognitive states, such as fight-or-flight decisions. However, the neural circuit mechanisms that generate such divergent behaviors across trials are not well understood. To investigate this question, here we studied the visual-evoked responses of larval zebrafish to moving objects of various sizes, which we found exhibited highly variable and divergent responses across repetitions of the same stimulus.In this work, we present a Fourier…
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23Feb 2024 by Admin
New Article on bioRxiv: “A Systematically Optimized Miniaturized Mesoscope (SOMM) for large-scale calcium imaging in freely moving mice”

New Article on bioRxiv: “A Systematically Optimized Miniaturized Mesoscope (SOMM) for large-scale calcium imaging in freely moving mice”

News
We are happy to announce that a new manuscript entitled “A Systematically Optimized Miniaturized Mesoscope (SOMM) for large-scale calcium imaging in freely moving mice” has been uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. Understanding how neuronal dynamics gives rise to ethologically relevant behavior requires recording of neuronal population activity via technologies that are compatible with unconstrained animal behavior. However, realizations of cellular resolution head mounted microscopes for mice have been based on conventional microscope designs that feature various forms of ad-hoc miniaturization and weight reduction measures necessary for compatibility with the weight-limits for free animal behavior. As a result, they have typically remained limited to a small field of view (FOV) or low resolution, a shallow depth range and often remain susceptible to motion-induced artifacts. We present a systematically optimized miniaturized…
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16Jan 2024 by Admin
New Article on bioRxiv: “Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number”

New Article on bioRxiv: “Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number”

New Publication, News
We are happy to announce that a new manuscript entitled “Simultaneous, cortex-wide and cellular-resolution neuronal population dynamics reveal an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number” has been uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. The brain’s remarkable properties arise from collective activity of millions of neurons. Widespread application of dimensionality reduction to multi-neuron recordings implies that neural dynamics can be approximated by low-dimensional “latent” signals reflecting neural computations. However, what would be the biological utility of such a redundant and metabolically costly encoding scheme and what is the appropriate resolution and scale of neural recording to understand brain function? Imaging the activity of one million neurons at cellular resolution and near-simultaneously across mouse cortex, we demonstrate an unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number. While half of the neural variance…
Read More