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UK DRI at UCL Seminar: Hongbo Jia, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology

13 September 2019, 12:00 pm–1:00 pm

UK Dementia Research Institute

Event Information

Open to

All

Organiser

Katharine Buckle

Location

Cruciform Foyer Meeting Room 1 (Boardroom)
Cruciform Building
Gower St, Fitzrovia
London
WC1E 6BT

'Holistic Bursting': A logic of learning-transformed single-cell firing mode

How learning experience shifts feature tuning maps in sensory cortical regions, is well-known. However, exactly how learning transforms sensory response firing patterns of individual cortical neurons, is unclear. Such transformation is crucial for understanding the logic in cortical processing of learned information. Here, in mice trained by sound-water associations, we found a sparse set of layer 2/3 neurons in primary auditory cortex, each of which, was transformed from singlet firing response mode to high-rate bursting response mode. Extinction training reverted such bursting cells to singlet firing mode, while a second associative training reinstated them to the bursting mode. In mice trained with multi-tone chords, we discovered cells with ‘holistic bursting’ (HB) mode: exhibiting bursting response specifically to one chord but not to any constituent tone presented at nearly equal loudness levels. Together, we demonstrate learning-transformed individual cortical neurons that embody a cognitively meaningful information processing logic.

About the Speaker

Hongbo Jia

at Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Hongbo Jia, PhD., is currently a principal investigator at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and a guest fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience, Technical University Munich. His lab in Suzhou focuses on the development and application of advanced optical tools for measuring neural network activities at single-cell and sub-cellular precision in intact living brains.

Having experienced in nanomaterial research and obtained diploma in physics, Hongbo mastered the skills of programming interactive physical instruments to operate in real-time. During his PhD study, he constructed microscopes that could perform simultaneous two-photon Ca2+ imaging and patch-clamp recording in-vivo, and with the help of those instruments, he made a small contribution to neuroscience: the finding of the “salt-&-pepper” mode of distribution of multiple different sensory input features in the dendrites of single cortical neurons (https://www.nature.com/articles/4641290b).

With the help of these advanced neuroscience instruments, extensive experiments in-vivo have been and are being performed in the lab of his best collaborator Dr. Xiaowei Chen at TMMU Chongqing. This talk will bring some of the most up-to-date results (unpublished) to the audience of the renowned neuroscience community at UCL.