Grant: Project Grant

Many animals, from insects to mammals exhibit complex collections of spatial behaviours for survival, including foraging for food, remembering where the home is, remembering safe routes back home after explanatory outbound path to a previously unvisited location, learning maps of new environments, and setting goal locations. To be successful, these spatial behaviors must be robust and able to deal with obstacles that hamper straight paths and occlude views, with novel environments, and with dynamically changing cues with familiar environments. Spatial navigation is dependent upon the formation, storage and retrieval of spatial memories, which permit repeated visits to fixed points in the environment. Our work is focused on understanding how the brain codes this information. Toward this aim we will unveil the interactions between neurones participating in spatial information coding. We will investigate how neurotransmitter release from single axon terminals is shaped by incoming input signals and how neurons in a small network cooperate to transmit this information to other brain areas. We will investigate these questions in rodents. In addition, we will use hippocampi resected during epilepsy surgery from patients to study the functional properties of these synapses in order to determine how similar or different they are compared to rodents.