Meeting Abstract
The Neural Systems & Behavior course at the Marine Biological Laboratory is the premier discovery-driven training opportunity for neuroethologists and systems neuroscientists. These fields have increasingly benefited from integrating data across spatial and temporal scales as well as levels of organization to understand the neural basis of behavior. We have enhanced and expanded the course by integrating molecular and genomic approaches with behavioral, electrophysiological, and evolutionary analyses to study complex problems in neuroscience. For instance, we have developed an interdisciplinary research program aimed at understanding the behavioral, electrophysiological, and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. We employ a hippocampal-dependent learning paradigm to assess how well laboratory mice can learn and remember to associate spatial cues with a stimulus. We then use ex vivo slice physiology to quantify the levels of synaptic plasticity that are indicative of a memory trace. Finally, we isolate discrete hippocampal regions and single neurons to identify changes in gene expression related to variability in behavior and synaptic plasticity. We find that active place avoidance training causes widespread input-specific changes in hippocampal synaptic network function that accompanies memory persistence. Ongoing research aims to identify transcriptome-wide changes in neural activity that are indicative of memory persistence and synaptic plasticity. Understanding how the brain stores memory is still poorly understood, but our integrative approach sheds new light on the neuromolecular mechanisms at play. This integrative approach can be applied to many unsolved questions about neural function and animal behavior.
