Neurotechnology Symposium

The Donders Institute presents:

Neurotechnology at the Donders Centre for Neuroscience

Date: March 8th, 2013
Time: 9:15 - 17:00, followed by drinks
Place: Figdor Hall, NCMLS building, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Registration: registration page (max. 90 participants)

The workshop is organized by Francesco Battaglia and Benno Roozendaal. This page is last updated on 28 February 2013.

Recent technological advances, such as optogenetics, genetic manipulation, micro and nanotechnology devices, have started a revolution in systems neuroscience, allowing us to probe brain circuits with unprecedented power and precision. The Donders Centre for Neuroscience has recently initiated multiple research lines at the crossroads of technology, neurophysiology and behavior. As a kickoff event for this effort, we will have a group of renowned international speakers showing us new technologies and the possibilities that they give to neuroscience. We will also showcase the new groups at the Donders Center for Neuroscience that will be involved in the neurotechnology research lines.

Program

9:15 Doors open and coffee
Morning session, chair: Benno Roozendaal
9:45 Paul Tiesinga
director DCN		 Introductory remarks
10:00 Albert van den Berg
(Twente)		 Lab on Chip: microfabricated tools for neuroscience applications
10:35 Coffee break
11:00 Tansu Celikel
(DCN Nijmegen)		 Closed-loop Brain Control
11:35 Lunch (basic lunch provided)
Afternoon session, chair: Francesco Battaglia
13:00 Edvard Moser
(Trondheim)		 Brain Maps for Space
abstract The mammalian space circuit is known to contain several functionally specialized cell types, such as place cells in the hippocampus and grid cells, head direction cells and border cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), but the interaction between these cells is poorly understood. I will present two sets of new findings. In the first study, we used a combined optogenetic-electrophysiological strategy to determine the functional identity of entorhinal cells with output to the place-cell population in the hippocampus. Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) was expressed selectively in the hippocampus-targeting subset of entorhinal projection neurons by injecting retrogradely transportable ChR2-coding recombinant adeno-associated viruses in the hippocampus. Virally transduced ChR2-expressing cells were identified in MEC as cells that fired at fixed minimal latencies in response to local flashes of light. A large number of responsive cells were grid cells but short-latency firing was also induced in border cells and head direction cells, as well as nonspatial cells and cells with irregular firing fields, suggesting that place signals may be generated by convergence of signals from a broad spectrum of entorhinal functional cell types, with grid cells being the predominant spatial cell type but not the only one. The second part of the lecture will discuss a novel form of cortical functional organization in the grid-cell network. Based on multi-channel recording from large numbers of cells in individual animals, I will show that grid cells cluster into a small number of modules with distinct grid scale, grid orientation and grid asymmetry, as well as distinct patterns of temporal organization. These modules respond independently to changes in the geometry of the environment. The discrete topography of the grid map and the apparent autonomy of the modules differ from the graded topography of maps for continuous variables in many sensory systems, raising the possibility that the modularity of the grid map is a product of self-organizing network dynamics rather than specificity in the input. Because the crystal-like structure of the grid pattern is generated within the brain, quite independently of the particular sensory inputs, understanding grid formation may put us on the track of fundamental mechanisms of pattern formation in the mammalian cortex
14:00 Pieter Roelfsema
(NIN Amsterdam)		 Feedforward and feedback processing for the perceptual organization of image elements in vision
14:35 Coffee break
15:10 Fabian Kloosterman
(NERF, Leuven)		 Large scale probing of hippocampal memory circuits
15:45 Oliver Griesbeck
(MPI Neurobiology Munich)		 Proteins, Biosensors, Brains
16:20 Jeffrey Glennon
(DCN Nijmegen)		 Translating preclinical biomonitoring techniques to clinical settings
16:55 Drinks

Date/period: 
Friday, March 8, 2013 - 09:15
Location: 
Figdor Hall, NCMLS building, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Date status: 
Fixed
Organizer: 
other