Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Image of green layer 5 pyramidal cell with text overlaid 'SWC Speaker Series'

Synapse pruning in development and Alzheimer’s

How can understanding synapse pruning in development help tackle neurodegenerative disease? In a recent SWC Seminar, Professor Carla Shatz demonstrated how looking at fundamental questions in neuroscience can lead to important discoveries about diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In this Q&A, she shares more.

Exploring the gap between knowledge and performance

What we know in our heads is not always smoothly translated into how we perform. In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Kishore Kuchibhotla shared his lab’s work investigating the strategies and insights animals may use during sensorimotor learning. In this Q&A, he hints at how such findings could be implied in our own learning, his career trajectory, and how that’s informed his research direction.

Exploring the maze of goal-directed behaviour

How do we get to the same grocery store using different routes in the face of obstacles, such as road works? In the third ENSS talk of 2023/24, Dr Dylan Rich shared his work on understanding model-based decision-making in rats using mazes. In this Q&A, Dr Rich discusses historical roots of studying animal goal-directed behaviour, the design of experimental mazes, and the intriguing use of odour cues in learning paradigms.

Images showing Zapit targeted stimulation light to 8 different ’stimulus’ patterns consisting of different bilateral and unilateral target points

Zapit: democratising random-access optogenetics

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

Unlocking the brain’s symphony with neural manifolds

Neural manifolds have become a cornerstone of neuroscience. Initially explored in locust perception, they now offer profound insights into brain function across species. SWC Seminar speaker Dr Juan Alvaro Gallego’s team have revealed patterns transcending intraspecies boundaries, shedding light on the brain’s inner workings.

Teaching artificial networks how animals pose

In this Q&A with SWC Seminar speaker Dr Matthew Whiteway, we delve into the nuances of pose estimation, contrasting supervised and unsupervised approaches, discussing the novel aspects of the Lightning Pose algorithm, and exploring its potential impact on neuroscience research.

26 February 2024

Understanding real world learning in adolescence

Learning in the real world is a highly complex process. There are many different aspects that influence an individual’s learning, such as context, feedback and the accumulation of past experience. In a recent SWC Seminar, Linda Wilbrecht, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, outlined her ongoing efforts to unpack this complexity in mice and potentially translate it back to human learning.

22 February 2024

RatInABox: a new toolkit for modelling navigation in the brain

Modelling navigation in the brain is no easy feat. Researchers often spend months writing code to enable them to study computational questions about how the brain represents the world. But what if there was a toolkit that could simulate animals moving around an environment and model their neural activity?

13 February 2024

Black-capped chickadee in the wild with text "SWC Speaker Series"

Could food-caching birds help elucidate memory formation?

Dr. Hannah Payne, a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University, studies chickadees as they offer unprecedented access to neural circuits at precise moments of memory formation and retrieval. In her recent Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series talk at SWC, she described the discovery of spatial representations in the avian hippocampus and how her latest research is allowing her to behaviourally dissociate physical location from viewed location.

31 January 2024

Collaborating towards genetic tools to study visually-guided behaviours

Dr Jianhua ‘JC’ Cang studies how visual functions, such as our being able to perceive with our eyes, arise from different cell types. In this interview, he shares his team’s findings in the superior colliculus, shedding light on the importance of collaboration and encouraging the visual neuroscience field to embrace the study of tree shrews.

22 January 2024

Revealing the hidden precision of inhibitory circuits

In a new paper published in Neuron, Petr Znamenskiy, Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and former postdoctoral researcher in the Mrsic-Flogel Lab, and colleagues looked at the organisation of inhibitory neurons, specifically focusing on their synaptic strength. Their research revealed unexpected precision of the synaptic strength of paravalbumin-positive (PV+) inhibitory neurons in the mouse visual cortex. This observation could help explain other experimental findings.

19 January 2024

Image of two populations of neurons in the motor cortex that relay information to the striatum with text overlaid "SWC Speaker Series"

Reaching for rewards: how spatial targets are learned

From reaching to pick up a cup of coffee to performing the latest TikTok dance move, we know the human brain is capable of refining movements into precise skills. In our first Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series (ENSS) talk of 2023/24, Dr Alice Mosberger, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, described a behavioural task she developed to dissect the sensorimotor areas that control different aspects of skilled movements. In this Q&A, she shares more.

15 January 2024