Bi250b
Topics in Systems Neuroscience
Winter, 2008

Class Time
Wed 2:00-3:55 in 101 Kerckhoff

Instructor
Thanos Siapas : thanoscaltech.edu

TA
Janna Nawroth : jnawrothcaltech.edu

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Group lists

Jan 9: Introduction

Jan 16: Techniques in systems neuroscience

Part 1 ca. 20min Electrophysiological techniques in systems neuroscience (Thanos)
Part 2 ca. 1h Guest lecture by Mala Murthy (post-doc, Laurent Lab) on genetic techniques in systems neuroscience

Malas' lecture slides

Part 3 ca. 30min Students' presentation on genetic techniques in systems neuroscience

Mala will discuss with you the following paper (so please prepare it thoroughly, i.e. read it and spend some time thinking about it, too):

1. Olsen et al. (2007), Excitatory Interactions between Olfactory Processing Channels in the Drosophila Antennal Lobe
   

Students (Group B) will present:

2. (B) Huber et al. (2008), Sparse optical microstimulation in barrel cortex drives learned behaviour in freely moving mice
   

Jan 23: Brain maps

1. (B) Luo and Flanagan (2007), Development of Continuous and Discrete Neural Maps
   
2. (A) Kohonen and Hari (1999), Where the abstract feature maps of the brain might come from
   
3. (A) Durbin and Mitchison (1990), A dimension reduction framework for understanding cortical maps
   

Jan 30: Spatial maps

1. (B) Fyhn et al. (2004), Spatial representation in the entorhinal cortex
   [supplementary material]
2. (B) Hafting et al. (2005), Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex
   [supplementary material 1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
   
3. (A) Burgess et al. (2007), An Oscillatory Interference Model of Grid Cell Firing
   

Feb 6: Spike timing dependent plasticity

1. (A) Markram et al. (1997), Regulation of Synaptic Efficacy by Coincidence of Postsynaptic APs and EPSPs
   
2. (A) Froemke and Dan (2002), Spike-timing-dependent synaptic modification induced by natural spike trains
   
3. (B) Roberts and Bell (2002), Spike timing dependent synaptic plasticity in biological systems
   

Feb 13: Neural oscillations

NOTE: changed format for this class - we will have two presentations followed by a debate of the two groups, where group A will support the idea that oscillations/timing etc are important for processing in the brain, and group B will argue against it.
Also note that only two papers will be required to read.


1. (B) Shadlen and Movshon (1999), Synchrony Unbound: A Critical Evaluation of the Temporal Binding Hypothesis
   
2. (A) Engel et al. (2001), DYNAMIC PREDICTIONS:OSCILLATIONS AND SYNCHRONY IN TOPDOWN PROCESSING
   
   NOT required anymore:
   
3. Perez-Orive et al. (2002), Oscillations and Sparsening of Odor Representations in the Mushroom Body
   Buzsaki and Draguhn (2004), Neuronal Oscillations in Cortical Networks
   

Feb 20: REM Sleep

1. (B) Louie and Wilson (2001), Temporally Structured Replay of Awake Hippocampal Ensemble Activity during Rapid Eye Movement Sleep
   
2. (A) Siegel (2001), The REM Sleep-Memory Consolidation Hypothesis
   
3. (A) Crick and Mitchison (1983), The function of dream sleep
   

Feb 27: Dopamine and learning

1. (A) Schultz et al. (1997), A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward
   
2. (B) Pan et al. (2005), Dopamine cells repond to predicted events during classical conditioning: evidence for eligibility traces in the reward-learning network
   
3. (B) Izhikevich (2007) Solving the Distal Reward Problem through Linkage of STDP and Dopamine Signaling
   

Mar 5: Synfire in the hole

1. (A) Ikegaya et al. (2001), Synfire Chains and Cortical Songs: Temporal Modules of Cortical Activity
   
2. (B) Mokeichev et al. (2007), Stochastic Emergence of Repeating Cortical Motifs in Spontaneous Membrane Potential Fluctuations In Vivo
   
3. (B) McLelland and Paulsen (2007), Cortical Songs Revisited: A Lesson in Statistics
   

Mar 12: Project Presentation

Groups A and B,please split in two teams each (so we have 4 teams overall, with 4 people/team).
Each team will design an experiment and give a 1/2h presentation on the project.
The project can be on any subject that the team chooses, and the presentation should include motivation, experimental design, pitfalls, interpretation, and future experiments that may come out of it.
There will be a price for the best project! :-)

Group A	John S., Joshua, Thomas, Marie, Julien, Julie, John Y., Elly
Group B	Peter W., Nathanie, Liz, Oliver, Anh, Sarah, Kim, Hidehiko

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