We have to write blogs? But that'll take time away from research!
This blog will probably be somewhat less impressive than those of my colleagues, both because I don’t have a camera and won’t be able to post any photos, and because I hope that I’ll be too busy with research to put very much into it. And because I have a bit of a personal aversion to blogs and blogging. But that’s a topic for discussion for another time… In person, in the real, physical world. Maybe over lunch or something.
But at any rate: Apart from this blogging, I’m really excited to be a part of the Howard Hughes program, and even more excited about my project for the summer. I’ll be working under David Fitzpatrick in the neurobiology department, doing research on the functional microarchitecture of visual cortex.
Visual cortex in most mammals is known to have very specific organization (columns of neurons that respond selectively to orientation, position, direction of movement, etc. arranged orderly across cortex… for more information check out work by Hubel and Weisel, or maybe take Psy 91). Still, the patterns of organization of individual neurons, the fundamental circuitry underlying visual processing, remains largely unknown.
In order to help address this, I’ll be working on bulk loading of calcium sensitive dyes and two-photon microscopy in living cortical tissue slices. In (very, very) brief: Bulk loading of calcium sensitive dyes is a technique for staining large populations of neurons and can be used to observe neural response properties (calcium ion flow is a central property of activity in neurons). Two-photon microscopy is a somewhat new technique that can be used to image live tissue at high resolution and to a depth of about 300 micrometers (standard one-photon fluorescence confocal microcopy can’t do any of this). Together, bulk loading and two-photon microscopy should allow us to trace the activity of neurons in visual cortex in response to stimulation of input neurons, and so allow us to map in the neural circuits underlying vision in extremely fine (single cell) detail.
So far, I’ve been reading as much background literature as I can on the topic to get myself up to speed, and looking for successful published methods of live in vitro bulk loading. Wednesday I shadowed someone who was doing bulk loading for a different lab. Friday, with much help from Sharon and Julie (infinitely helpful fellow lab members—thanks guys!), I worked on building and setting up a system for tissue slice incubation and staining (a lot of cutting, gluing, and digging through drawers full of random hardware—actually a lot of fun). I’ll start the actual wet work in the next few days. Can’t wait!
I guess I’ll be keeping you (whoever you are) updated as the project progresses.
HF
