Long-Term Precision Editing of Neural Circuits Using Engineered Gap Junction Hemichannels

Dzirasa, Kafui; Ransey, Elizabeth; Chesnov, Kirill; Wisdom, Elias; Bowman, Ryan; Rodriguez, T.; Adamson, Elise; Thomas, Gwenaëlle E.; Almoril-Porras, Agustin; Schwennesen, Hannah; Colón-Ramos, Daniel A.; Hultman, Rainbo; Bursac, Nenad

doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2022.02.055

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Using chemical and genetic approaches, we increase and decrease Kenyon cell number and Kenyon cell input number. This approach adds to a growing body of literature in which researchers engineer cell biological changes to neurons in order to probe developmental algorithms or change circuit function (Dzirasa et al, 2022;Hawk et al, 2021;Heckman and Doe, 2022;Linneweber et al, 2020;Meng et al, 2019;Pechuk et al, 2022;Pop et al, 2020;Prieto-Godino et al, 2020). Both the developmental and functional results force us to rethink assumptions and predictions about how the structure of connectivity influences odor representations and learned associations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hacking brain development to test models of sensory coding

Ahmed

Rajagopalan

Pan

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Animals can discriminate myriad sensory stimuli but can also generalize from learned experience. You can probably distinguish the favorite teas of your colleagues while still recognizing that all tea pales in comparison to coffee. Tradeoffs between detection, discrimination, and generalization are inherent at every layer of sensory processing. During development, specific quantitative parameters are wired into perceptual circuits and set the playing field on which plasticity mechanisms play out. A primary goal of systems neuroscience is to understand how material properties of a circuit define the logical operations--computations--that it makes, and what good these computations are for survival. A cardinal method in biology--and the mechanism of evolution--is to change a unit or variable within a system and ask how this affects organismal function. Here, we make use of our knowledge of developmental wiring mechanisms to modify hard-wired circuit parameters in the Drosophila melanogaster mushroom body and assess the functional and behavioral consequences. By altering the number of expansion layer neurons (Kenyon cells) and their dendritic complexity, we find that input number, but not cell number, tunes odor selectivity. Simple odor discrimination performance is maintained when Kenyon cell number is reduced and augmented by Kenyon cell expansion.

show abstract