Elementary neural circuits

Our brain is responsible for all our awareness, thoughts and actions. In spite of the incredible array of procedures the brain executes - from memory to emotion - its elementary units of function are the nerve cell and the synaptic junction - the site of communication among nerve cells.
In mammals and particularly in humans, the cerebral cortex is an area of the brain which is crucially included in nearly all the cognitive functions. Separate neurons in the cortex can make over 10,000 connections with another brain cells. The accurate pattern of connections among a local group of neurons in the cortex gives increases to its elementary unit of computation - the cortical microcircuit.

The aim is to reveal how cortical microcircuits execute sensory information to drive behavior. Whereas decades of research have carefully outlined how separate neurons extract particular features from the sensory environment, the cellular and synaptic mechanisms which allow ensembles of cortical neurons to really process the sensory information and produce the perceptions are mainly unknown.

Addressing this primary question of modern neuroscience needs working at both the cellular and system-wide level to assess how the populations of neurons help to encode information, create perceptions, and execute the behavioral decisions. Towards this end, we monitor and then manipulate particular subsets of genetically specified neurons in awake behaving mice to quantitatively determine their contribution to the sensory processing and behavior. By turning neurons 'on' and 'off' by using the optogenetic and pharmacogenetic approaches, we can specify groups of cortical neurons which are both essential and adequate for particular neural computations.