Please note: this seminar will not be posted to YouTube.

The development of neural circuits is profoundly impacted by both spontaneous and sensory experience. This is perhaps most well studied in the visual system, where disruption of early spontaneous activity called retinal waves prior to eye opening and visual deprivation after eye opening leads to alterations in the response properties and connectivity in several visual centers in the brain.

We address this question in the retina, which comprises multiple circuits that encode different features of the visual scene, culminating in over 40 different types of retinal ganglion cells. Direction-selective ganglion cells respond strongly to an image moving in the preferred direction and weakly to an image moving in the opposite, or null, direction.  Moreover, as recently described (Sabbah et al, 2017) the preferred directions of direction selective ganglion cells cluster along four directions that align along two optic flow axes, causing variation of the relative orientation of preferred directions along the retinal surface.  I will provide recent progress in the lab that addresses the role of visual experience and spontaneous retinal waves in the establishment of direction selective tuning and direction selectivity maps in the retina.

Those who wish to meet the speak should contact Heike Blockus, Polleux Lab

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.