Eventos

Speaker: Dr. Albert Cardona

Group Leader – Experimental and comparative connectomics, Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge (UK).

Abstract

To understand how the nervous system works, we map its synaptic wiring diagram, or connectome; optogenetically drive activity in select neurons to define a neuron-behaviour map; observe the activity of all neurons in a circuit; and study how neuromodulation restructures and repurposes circuits by changing neural circuit dynamics. All of the above is techonologically feasibly in small, genetically tractable organisms such as the larval Drosophila melanogaster. Then, on the basis of the connectome, we formulate computational models of neural circuit function that can capture the observed activity dynamics that underlie behavior, and which serves as a playground for formulating experimentally testable hypotheses of neural circuit function.