Blog

Read the story behind Zapit, a random-access optogenetics system developed at SWC in collaboration with the Advanced Microscopy team.

New research from the Duan Lab, published as two preprints, shows that mice trained to play a competitive game against an exploitative computer learned to keep their opponent guessing. When a choice was unpredictable, reward signals in the cortex were still present but no longer tied to the next choice. While dopamine tracked reward outcomes to guide learning, norepinephrine signals reflected longer timescale information to shape broader strategy in multi-agent decision contexts.

Research from Dr Kris Jensen and colleagues at SWC, UCL and the University of Oxford explores how the prefrontal cortex makes plans. Their work combines knowledge of neural processes known to occur in other brain systems with recent observations that different prefrontal neurons represent different steps of future behaviour. The result is a new theoretical model of how the prefrontal cortex plans behaviour, called a ‘spacetime attractor’.

Free CAD models and build instructions, plus fully supported, robust and open-source software are available for any researcher to run their own serial-section two-photon tomography system.

Dr Zane Mitrevica’s PhD studies investigated gait in mice. In this article, she discusses her findings and how they deepen our understanding of animal movement.

Sleep not only makes us feel better, but it’s vital for helping us form memories and learn new skills. For many years, neuroscientists have studied how the brain consolidates episodic memories during sleep, which are memories of experiences such as what you did last weekend. But consolidation also occurs for procedural memories, so called “muscle memories”, such as learning to serve a tennis ball.

New research from Professor Tiago Branco’s lab shows that neurons in the mouse brain’s escape command centre, the dorsal periaqueductal grey (dPAG), are exquisitely poised to respond to a tiny amount of input. And when enough cells in the dPAG fire, an escape is triggered. 

A decade ago, the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre opened its doors with a bold ambition: to understand how the brain generates behaviour. In partnership with the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, the SWC shares a vision to understand the mechanisms of intelligent behaviour in brains and machines. At this year's joint annual symposium, researchers from both centres came together to present their work and celebrate progress towards that goal.