Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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SYNP: Symposium Neurophysics: Physical Approaches to Deciphering Neuronal Information Processing

SYNP 1: Symposium Neurophysics (SYNP): Physical Approaches to Deciphering Neuronal Information Processing

SYNP 1.2: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 10:00–10:30, H 0105

Whole-brain imaging and analysis of network activity in behaving zebrafish — •Misha Ahrens — Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA

The nervous system endows animals the ability to generate complex behavior. A central challenge in neuroscience is to understand how large recurrent networks of neurons, spanning from the sensory to the motor periphery, implement computations required for driving behavior in response to environmental cues. We developed techniques for measuring neural activity at the cellular level in almost the entire brain of a small vertebrate, the larval zebrafish, as it behaves in virtual reality. Three-dimensional light-sheet imaging paired with large-scale analyses can generate whole-brain maps of neuronal populations involved in sensory processing and the generation of motor output, and allow for analyses of the temporal interactions between members of these populations. We used these techniques to gain insight into the generation of spontaneous behavior as well as learned adaptation in sensory to motor pathways. In many cases, the analyses identified small neural populations restricted to known or unknown nuclei. These nuclei often consisted of only a few hundred cells out of a total of 100,000 brain cells, generating hope that such techniques can be used to eventually dissect whole-brain function into understandable subunits.