‘Effect of intracellular transient memory on the dinamycs of neurons and neural networks’

Francisco de Borja Rodríguez Ortíz, Gonzalo García Polavieja, Hugh Robinson, Mikko Juusola, Pablo Varona Martínez, Raul Guantes. Roberto Latorre Camino.

This proposal is a multidisciplinary effort to answer this question. Joining the knowledge from biophysics, genetics, electrophysiology, imaging and computer science, we plan to build new bioinformatics tools to control and monitor neural behaviour in its most natural setting. Using these tools, we will study the existence of preferred spike patterns as a fundamental mode of neuronal communication. Stimulating neurons with their preferred spike patterns and monitoring simultaneously the intracellular calcium dynamics, we will investigate the role of intracellular memory in individual cell and network dynamics. Other bioinformatics tools like spike-pattern analysis software and realistic models of membrane and calcium dynamics will be developed to investigate the importance of transient intracellular memory in specific computational tasks. Several preparations will be used to show the generality of the results: leech sensory and motor networks, Drosphila visual networks as well as cortical neurons from the rat. The results from this proposal will be of fundamental importance for our understanding of neuronal communication and network activity.