Neuroscientists Talk Shop

Thursday, April 28, 2022

On April 28, 2020  we met with Hojoon Lee to discuss taste receptors, their constant  turnover, and the need for the taste system to constantly recreate the  specificity of connections between taste receptors and the brain.

This is our last episode for the Spring.  We’ll be back in August.

Guest:  Hojoon Lee, Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University. https://www.hojoonlee...

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

On Thursday March  6, 2008 we recorded episode 9 of Neuroscientists talk Shop.  Our guess was John Lisman, from Brandeis University. We enjoyed a 50 minute discussion with John that touched on a range of topics. This  retrospective summary of that conversation has been heavily edited for linearity, and the topics have been thinned out somewhat...

August 25, 2022

Andrew Maurer joined us to talk about the language used by hippocampal neurons to communicate with each other and with other cells in the brain.  The conversation started by referring to last month’s retrospective of the John Lisman podcast from long ago, but ranged over a number of other topics, including the future prospects for understanding brain dynamics from electrophysiological recordings...

On Thursday, September 8, 2022 we were joined by Genaro Coria-Avila, to talk about sexually dimorphic nuclei in the brain, other forms of brain sexual dimorphism, and their relation to sexual behavior.

Guest:

Dr. Genaro Coria-Avila, Genaro is a research scientist at the Brain Research Institute at the Universidad Veracruzana  in Xalapa, Mexico...

On Thursday, October 6, 2022 we got the opportunity to talk to Nicolas Tritsch about his studies of oscillatory fluctuations in dopamine and acetylcholine measured simultaneously in the striatum during behavior. We started from the technical side of this new experimental technology, but the conversation ranged into the implications of these oscillations for striatal function and learning, and for Parkinson's disease...

On October 13, 2022 we sat down to chat with Mel B. Feany about the molecular processes underlying the neuropathology of alpha-synuclein and Parkinson's disease. We focused on her findings implicating the actin cytoskeleton as an intermediary in mitochondrial dysfunction and other cellular mechanisms that contribute to pathology and cell death.

Guest: 

Mel B Feany, Department of Pathology, Division of Neuropathology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School...

On Thursday, October 20, we held our 13th annual Neuroscience Symposium.  The topic was organoid models of cortical development.  Brain organoids are 3-dimensional tissues grown from pluripotent stem cells. For studying cortical development, the stem cells are cultured under conditions that promote differentiation into cerebral cortex neurons...

On October 27, 2022 we got the opportunity to talk to Michael Scofield about methods used to study the structure and synaptic function of astrocytes, and some of the advances that have resulted from their use, especially for glutamatergic synapses in the cerebral cortex.

Guest: 

Michael Scofield, Departments  of Neuroscience and Anesthesia and Perioperative Medicine at Medical University of South Carolina...

On November 3rd, 2022 we talked with Harold Zakon about the cells that enable weakly electric fish to generate electric fields around themselves and to use them as a sensory and social communication system.  Harold described the remarkable independent evolution of this capability twice, in the African and in the South American electric fish, and the host of coordinated genetic changes that were required to create this entirely new sensory modality...

On November 17, 2022 we talked with Susan Sangha about brain mechanisms of learned fear and safety, and the neural circuits in the amygdala, cerebral cortex and hippocampus that evaluate threat and mediate our responses to it.

Guest:

Susan Sangha, Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Stark Neuroscience Research Institute...