Neuronal Networks

The tissue culture facilities allow us to grow and maintain neuronal cultures. The facilities for electrophysiology, neuro-optics and multielectrode array recordings and stimulations are being used to study neuronal networks in cultures and brain slices.

Other research interests relate to understanding how a single neuron integrates the signals that it receives at the dendrites and whether the neuronal network activity associated with learning during the training process gets registered spatio-temporally as measurable physiological changes in a single neuron. We propose to measure the spatio-temporal profile of voltage and intracellular calcium ions in single neurons. Training a neuronal network to learn also opens the possibility of using the system to understand how the network activity changes and impacts the learning if a few of the neurons die, quite akin to the conditions encountered clinically in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s.