A Snapshot seminar hosted by the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience
- Paul Chadderton: Title: Golgi cells: what are they good for?
Abstract: Golgi cells are inhibitory interneurons residing in the input layer of the cerebellar cortex. These neurons sit in a key position to govern cerebellar information processing, and indeed Golgi cells have many proposed roles. However, direct assessment of their function in vivo has not been performed before.
Here, I will talk about experiments where we have chemogenetically turned down Golgi cell activity in awake mice, and measured the consequences for neuronal population activity and whisking behaviour. Our results shed light on the contributions Golgi cells make to cerebellar transformation.
- Ilaria D'Atri: Title: Footstep counting in fruit flies
Abstract: Figuring out the route and how far you need to walk to reach your destination is easy when using Google Maps. In the animal kingdom, strong navigational skills are fundamental for survival, whether for short bounds or long-distance migrations. Among the most remarkable navigators are desert ants. Despite wandering hundreds of meters away from their nest through convoluted routes, ants possess an innate capability to return home via the shortest way. They do that by calculating vectors based on direction and distance; a process termed path integration. The head-direction system, encoding the animal's perceived directional heading with respect to its environment, it has been widely studied and shows similar architecture in rodents and flies. However, understanding how animals estimate distances has proved to be more challenging; preliminary evidence in ants points to the existence of a step integrator or pedometer that keeps track of how far ants walk. In this talk, I will outline how a new memory-based assay, combining aversive stimulus and optogenetics, has helped us dissect neuronal circuits for distance estimation in walking flies.