Abstract

Our current level of understanding of brain function is mostly based upon naturally occurring lesions in patients and experimental lesions in animals, as well as extracellular recordings from awake, behaving animals. While this has told us much about what a particular brain region does, it tells us far less about how it does it. This would require understanding how the various elements of the neural circuitry of a particular brain region (i.e. its neuronal celltypes) interact with each other and those of different brain regions, which requires recording the results of experimental manipulations of individual celltypes. While genetically-encoded tools for manipulating neural activity have long been available, the ability to deploy such tools with the requisite specificity has not. Recent years have seen great progress in both our understanding of the remarkable number of neuronal celltypes and molecular genetic techniques to specifically target them.

This symposium will bring together up-and-coming young scientists from around the world to discuss the roles played by different celltypes in memory function. Each investigator uses distinct approaches, ranging from intracellular recordings to imaging in behaving animals, but they all manipulate the activity of specific neuronal celltypes of the hippocampal-entorhinal loop to understand information processing in the neural circuitry of memory.