Neuroscience

Extraction of fluorescence from in-vivo two photon images from live behaving mice [1]

One of the longstanding questions in neuroscience is to understand how memories are stored and retrieved. In order to test this hypothesis, I developed computational tools in collaboration with Profs. Karl Deisseroth, Priya Rajasethupathy and colleagues at Stanford University. We found that the information is stored as a small world network. We also found the existence of “hub neurons” that are preferentially recruited during memory retrieval.

Demonstration of the presence of highly connected “hub” neurons based on imaging the hippocampus of mice in various contexts.
  1. Rajasethupathy, P.*, Sankaran, S.*, Marshel, J.H.*, Kim, C.K., Ferenczi, E., Lee, S.Y., Berndt, A., Ramakrishnan, C., Jaffe, A., Lo, M., Liston, C. and Deisseroth, K., Projections from neocortex mediate top-down control of memory retrieval,Nature 526, pp. 653-659, 2015. (* indicates equal contributors) .
  2. Tomer, R., Lovett-Barron, M., Kauvar, I., Andalman ,A., Burns, V.M., Sankaran, S., Grosenick, L., Broxton, M., Yang, S., and Deisseroth, K. SPED light sheet microscopy: fast mapping of biological system structure and function, Cell, 163(1), pp. 1796-1806, 2015.