Collaborative Research: A Comprehensive Approach to Birdsong Dynamics: Experiments and Modeling

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Describing the action of the nervous system in quantitative terms is an important goal in neuroscience, but has been hampered by lack of appropriate techniques to describe the complex time-varying activity patterns of individual neurons. The activity patterns a given neuron expresses depend on the inputs to that neuron and the intrinsic properties of that neuron. A central limitation has been the inability to determine from data collected from real neurons the specific values of various conductances and other properties of those neurons that define their time-varying patterns of activity. To address this limitation, this project will combine real data derived from targeted experiments with modeling of those data to create a new synthesis. Data will be collected under controlled conditions from highly studied identified populations of neurons of the avian forebrain. The experimental procedures especially the structure and families of current pulses in those intracellular recordings will be tightly coordinated with a parallel effort to develop techniques to estimate the parameters of the recorded neurons. The goal of these combined experiments is to fully characterize the parameters of the neurons so as to describe the time-varying properties of the neurons. Success in this effort will be broadly applicable, providing a fundamental new approach to fully incorporating actual experimental data to characterize the activity properties of individual neurons. In the first instance, this will be applied to describing attributes of neuronal activity that are related to vocal production and learning and auditory memory phenomena. This project will also result in significant training opportunities. Biologists early in their careers will be trained in the emerging field of computational neuroscience. Young physicists and other quantitative scientists seeking new problems outside of their traditional disciplines will receive training in biological thinking and biological methods. These individuals will thus learn early in their careers a multidisciplinary approach to scientific problems that is the emerging paradigm for modern research.