Events Calendar

Biomedical Engineering Department Guest Speaker

Speaker: Jennifer Treweek, Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Biology and Bioengineering, Caltech

Talk Title: Functional and anatomical mapping of neuropeptide circuitry using modern neuroscience techniques

Abstract: Neuropeptide systems are notoriously difficult to study due to their biological complexity and the overall technical inadequacy of traditional pharmacological tools (e.g., synthetic design of receptor ligands, immunohistochemistry-based labeling). However, given the pathological relevance of neuropeptides, such as corticotropin releasing factor, to a variety of disease states, the functional and anatomical characterization of neuropeptide circuitry is crucial to our discovery of better disease therapies. The development and application of new technologies to enable such characterization is an important first step towards this goal.
In my talk, I will summarize recent improvements to in vivo modalities for recording and perturbing neuronal activity in behaving rodents, as well as ex vivo techniques for analyzing the functional connectivity of targeted cells at the single-molecule through systems-levels. In particular, our methods for the multiplexed labeling and imaging of mRNA and peptide epitopes at depth in cleared tissue offer scientists an opportunity to visualize transcriptional changes and structural plasticity in intact circuits during the progression of disease.

Host: Ellis Meng, PhD

Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145/145A

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta