CRCNS: From Sensation to Perception: Cellular and Circuit Mechanisms Underlying Prey Detection in an Electric Fish

CRCNS：从感觉到感知：电鱼猎物检测的细胞和电路机制

• 批准号: 1430065
• 负责人: Nathaniel Sawtell
• 金额: $ 72万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1430065&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CRCNS; Sensation; Perception; Cellular; Circuit

A primary goal of neuroscience is to understand how the many components of the brain interact with each other to give rise to the remarkable capacities of perception, movement, and thinking exhibited by humans and other animals. For most brain regions, the parts list is too long and the function is poorly understood. This proposal takes advantage of an unusual animal--a fish that emits its own electrical field-- in which the brain structure is simple enough and the function sufficiently well understood, so that the detailed structure of neural circuits can be directly linked to function. The project combines high-resolution experimental measurements from individual components of the fish's brain with mathematical modeling to make such links. The specific goal of the proposal is to understand how changes in the strength of connections between neurons allows the fish to learn to ignore sensations produced by its own motor actions, so that the fish is better able to perceive tiny electrical fields generated by insect prey. The work entails extensive collaborative exchange between experimentalists and neural modelers, and will provide students at the undergraduate and graduate level with cross-disciplinary training. Additionally, science projects will be developed and taken to inner-city K-12 classrooms. Finally, the work has implications for our understanding of failures in the neural mechanisms that learn to distinguish self-generated from external sensory signals, a problem that is thought to occur in human neurological disorders such as schizophrenia.The cerebellum-like electrosensory lobe (ELL) of mormyrid electric fish is an ideal model system for exploring how motor corollary discharge is used to predict self-generated sensory signals. Past work has produced a well-tested model in which spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity sculpts well-described motor corollary discharge responses into a negative image of the sensory response to the fish's own electric organ discharge (EOD). The goal of this proposal is to extend this model from a description of the recordings of negative images in ELL to an understanding of the fish's ability to use this circuitry to detect the minute electrical signals generated by prey. The project will determine how ELL supports the detection of prey-like signals assessed from extracellular spike trains of identified neuron classes recorded at several key processing stages within the ELL. In parallel, models of ELL adaptive processing will be constructed to identify the essential features needed to account for the measured detection performance at both the neural and the behavioral level. Together, these closely coordinated experimental and theoretical efforts will provide a detailed explanation of how plasticity operating in a well-characterized circuit contributes to behavior.

神经科学的一个主要目标是了解大脑的许多组成部分如何相互作用，以产生人类和其他动物所表现出的感知，运动和思维的非凡能力。对于大多数大脑区域来说，零件列表太长，功能也很难理解。这个提议利用了一种不寻常的动物--一种能发射自己电场的鱼--它的大脑结构足够简单，功能也足够清楚，因此神经回路的详细结构可以直接与功能联系起来。该项目结合了高分辨率的实验测量，从鱼的大脑的各个组成部分与数学建模，使这种联系。该提案的具体目标是了解神经元之间连接强度的变化如何使鱼学会忽略自身运动动作产生的感觉，以便鱼能够更好地感知昆虫猎物产生的微小电场。这项工作需要实验学家和神经建模者之间进行广泛的合作交流，并将为本科生和研究生提供跨学科培训。 此外，科学项目将被开发并带到市中心的K-12教室。 最后，这项工作对我们理解学习区分自我产生的外部感觉信号的神经机制的失败有影响，这个问题被认为发生在人类神经系统疾病中，如Schizophrenia.The cerebellum-like electrosensory lobe（ELL）of mormyrid electric fish是一个理想的模型系统，用于探索如何使用运动推论放电来预测自我产生的感觉信号。过去的工作已经产生了一个经过充分测试的模型，其中尖峰时间依赖性突触可塑性将描述良好的运动推论放电反应雕刻成对鱼自己的电器官放电（EOD）的感觉反应的负面图像。这个建议的目标是扩展这个模型从描述的负图像在ELL的理解鱼的能力，使用这个电路来检测由猎物产生的微小电信号的记录。该项目将确定ELL如何支持从ELL内几个关键处理阶段记录的已识别神经元类的细胞外尖峰序列评估的猎物样信号的检测。同时，ELL自适应处理的模型将被构建，以确定所需的基本功能，以占在神经和行为水平的测量检测性能。总之，这些密切协调的实验和理论工作将提供一个详细的解释如何可塑性运作在一个良好的特征电路有助于行为。