BME seminar
CORTICAL POPULATION DYNAMICS FOR ADAPTIVE LOCOMOTION AND GRASPING IN THE MOUSE
Britton Sauerbrei, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Neurosciences
ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ School of Medicine
Thursday, August 29, 2024 at 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Wickenden 321
About Dr. Sauerbrei:
Britton Sauerbrei received a BA in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology, and performed postdoctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus. In 2022, he joined the faculty at the ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurosciences, where his laboratory is focused on understanding how interactions across neural networks in the motor system control complex behaviors.
Abstract:
The ability of mammals to move through complex environments and interact with objects requires coordinated patterns of activity across large populations of neurons in the motor cortex, cerebellum, and spinal cord. Our long-term goal is to measure and manipulate these patterns in behaving animals, identify the dynamical rules that generate them, and determine how they are used to flexibly control natural movement. In this seminar, I will describe our progress towards this goal in the laboratory mouse. First, in a skilled reach-to-grasp task, we find that the motor cortex requires continuous, temporally-patterned inputs to generate appropriate commands. Next, during overground locomotion, which in rodents is clocked by a spinal pattern generator, we observe that changes to mechanical load in the limb induce consistent changes in motor output. While this adaptation does not require motor cortex, it nonetheless induces a large shift in cortical activity, and this shift is robust to experimental perturbation of cerebellar function. Finally, we identify cortical activity patterns related to the timing and execution of voluntary gait modification as animals traverse obstacles.