Seminários em Neurociências 2012.1

Prezados,

em virtude do concurso para professor, o seminário será excepcionalmente realizado esta terça-feira, dia 03/04, as 11h na biblioteca do ICe-UFRN. As informações sobre a palestra seguem:

Speaker: Adrien Peyrache, PhD, Buzsaki Lab, Rutgers University

Organization of cell assemblies in the neocortex upon learning: interaction with the hippocampus and the thalamus.

It has been hypothesized that neuronal activity in the cortex self-organizes in subsets of coherent firing units which would thus represent together internal and external information, the so-called cell assemblies. In the hippocampus, a key structure in memory formation, cell assemblies that formed with waking experience are spontaneously reactivated during subsequent sleep episodes, in particular Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), hence evidencing the determinant role of sleep in memory consolidation. This memory replay would lead reactivation in the neocortex. Concomitantly, during SWS, the thalamo-cortical network oscillates in waxing-and-waning patterns, called spindles, which have been shown to be also strongly involved in memory consolidation. However, the functional relationship between replay of cell assemblies, thalamic oscillatory entrainment and memory reprocessing is still poorly understood.

In this presentation, we will first introduce novel methodologies characterizing the formation and the dynamics of neocortical cell assemblies. We will then present new evidences showing how memory traces in the neocortex are first tagged with hippocampal assemblies upon learning, then reactivated during sleep and eventually consolidated by a complex interplay between hippocampal and thalamic inputs.