Understanding associative memory is fundamental for a variety of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, however, a large proportion of this research has excluded female subjects due to unsubstantiated bias. By including intact females, ovariectomized females and males in the study of associative memory, clear sex differences in acquisition emerged. Female mice...
Chemokines, such as Stromal Derived Factor 1 (SDF-1 or CXCL12) and their G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are well known regulators of the development and functions of numerous tissues. CXCL12 has two receptors: CXCR4 and CXCR7 or atypical chemokine receptor 3 (ACKR3). CXCR7 has been described as an atypical “biased”...
We have a remarkable ability to perform complex, coordinated movements without much conscious effort. In addition to the computations required to generate commands for muscles, a key aspect of coordinated motor control is incorporating sensory feedback about the movement. One of the most important feedback routes is through proprioception, the...
Breast cancer patients have reported nonspecific neurologic symptoms such as fatigue, depression, and cognitive concerns while undergoing adjuvant therapy. Few neuroimaging studies have examined hormone therapy, an adjuvant therapy, and more research is needed to determine possible neurologic and cognitive effects. Previous estrogen research has found alterations in gray matter...
After stroke, inappropriate muscle activity phasing during the locomotor cycle is a key contributor to locomotor impairment. Muscle phasing has been shown to vary between behaviors post-stroke, but the degree to which individuals can voluntarily modulate activity is unclear. This dissertation consists of a series of three studies that investigate...
Interactions between working memory and long term memory systems are still not well understood, as the systems have long been thought to be mostly separate. An interesting intersection of these memory systems is domain-specific expertise, whereby individuals are able to show supra-span memory for information related to the area of...
Persons with spinal cord injuries can use state-of-the-art brain-computer interfaces to control robotic arms. Despite this high-tech solution, their movements are slow and imprecise, much like those made by individuals who have lost proprioception, the sense of body position and movement. Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) used to reactivate neural circuits in...
The answer to the question “Why do we sleep?” lies in understanding the biological underpinnings of homeostatic drive to sleep. Wakefulness is correlated with numerous changes in brain activity, structure and gene/protein expression that re-normalize following sleep however which of these elements is sufficient to cause sleep drive and how...
The apolipoprotein E (APOE) E4 isoform is the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While APOE is predominantly expressed by astrocytes in the central nervous system, neuronal expression of APOE is of increasing interest in age-related cognitive impairment, neurological injury, and neurodegeneration. Here we show that endogenous...
Aging is the greatest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD); however, the molecular mechanisms underlying aging and how it can initiate and or exacerbate AD, is still unknown. Epigenetic regulation has been widely accepted to play an essential role in aging or AD-related processes; however, whether dysregulations of histone...
The retina detects light, processes the visual signal, and sends a complex set of parallel information channels to the brain via a functionally diverse set of retinal ganglion cells types. This manuscript examines these retinal ganglion cell types, the visual features they encode, and the computational mechanisms leading to their...
Voltage-gated Na channels are expressed in all neurons, and are responsible for the upstroke of the action potential. They are part of a complex of proteins that includes pore-forming α subunits and auxiliary subunits that modify their trafficking, gating, and function. The modulation of Na channels by auxiliary subunits is...
Human olfactory function is important for a myriad of behaviors, including food seeking, social cognition, memory, emotional regulation, and detecting environmental threats. In animal models, particularly dense olfactory inputs have been shown to target orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region involved in multimodal sensory integration, reward coding, and flexibly guiding our...
The hippocampus has a well-established role in episodic memory and serves as a hub in a network of distributed brain regions (i.e., hippocampal-cortical network; HCN). Theta-band (4-8 Hz) neural activity recorded in the hippocampus have been associated with memory processing, and synchronized theta oscillations among the hippocampus and HCN regions...
Different features of the visual world are conveyed to the retino-recipient regions of the brain by more than 40 types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCS). Feature detection by RGCs depends on a combination of intrinsic and morphological properties where the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory inputs occurs through local retinal...
All animals purposefully navigate feature-rich environments: while exploring, in search of vital resources of food and water, finding mates, and patrolling and marking habitats. During these complex behaviors, continuous analogue input information from peripheral sensory organs guides discrete and digital sequential motor output; accordingly, each action is informed, modulated, or...
Research over the past several decades has revealed that memory reactivation in sleep contributes to the formation of long-lasting memories. Among the most recent developments in this field is the widespread use of the technique of targeted memory reactivation (TMR), which allows researchers to induce reactivation of specific memories during...
Neural stem and progenitor cell (NPC) fate specification is a crucial component of central nervous system development, and the myriad signaling pathways that guide it are poorly understood. In my thesis work, I aimed to elucidate signaling mechanisms of the bone morphogenetic protein family (BMP) and some of its targets...
Prions are self-perpetuating, alternative protein conformations associated with neurological diseases and normal cellular functions. Saccharomyces cerevisiae contains many endogenous prions – providing a powerful system to study prionization. Previously, the Li Lab demonstrated that Swi1, a component of the SWI/SNF chromatin-remodeling complex, can form the prion [SWI+]. A small region,...
The dentate gyrus is the first region for information processing within the classic hippocampal trisynaptic circuit, and this position makes it an important structure for the formation of associative memories. The dentate gyrus contains two major types of excitatory neurons: granule cells and mossy cells. While previous work has shown...