"Dombeck Lab develops new optical technique to measure synaptic input to place cellss"
June 11, 2021
"A recent paper from the Dombeck lab from NUIN student Mike Adoff and postdoc Jason Climer, with help from postdoc Heydar Davoudi. They developed a 2-photon imaging technique that uses the green glutamate sensor, iGluSnFR, and the red calcium sensor jRGECO to first identify place and non place cells in the hippocampus of mice navigating in virtual reality, and then zoom in on their dendrites to see what synaptic inputs the cells are receiving. They found that place cells receive more spatially tuned inputs compared to nonplace cells, and that the input was more functionally clustered along the dendrites of place cells. These results will require a revision of the current model for place cell firing and the new techniques should be broadly applicable to understand the synaptic basis of neuronal firing patterns during behavior."