Abstract

Reading the neural code off the body of a freely behaving animal

Brain circuits produce rich patterns of electrical activity, which are thought to underlie phenomena such as perception, behavior and reasoning. Deciphering neural population activity is arguably one of the most important tasks of neuroscience. In this talk, I present an overview over our research efforts towards this goal and describe the challenges associated with the acquisition, processing and modeling of live imaging data.
Specifically, I focus on my recent work on cuttlefish (sepia), which was conducted in collaboration with neurobiologist Gilles Laurent. The skin patterns that cuttlefish use for camouflage offer a unique opportunity to obtain an almost complete readout of a hierarchical network of motor control and to study a complex adaptive sensory-motor transformation. The body-wide skin patterns are the direct expression of a neural control over the expansion and contraction of hundreds of thousands of pigment-filled cells known as chromatophores.
To analyze this system, my group has developed a multi-level video analysis pipeline to track a large fraction of chromatophores simultaneously over a month, using high temporal resolution. Based on the correlated expansion and contraction of chromatophores, we have started to infer the hierarchical motor network controlling the skin patterns that span five orders of magnitude, from individual cells to the entire body.

This work sets the stage for modeling the complete input-output transform that underlies camouflage in cuttlefish, from the visual perception of textures in the environment to their reproduction on the body surface.

Bio

Professor Kaschube is Professor (W2) and Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, Goethe University, and Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.
After obtaining his "Dr. rer. nat." (PhD) degree in Theoretical Physics, Georg-August-University, Go?ttingen he went to be a Bernstein Fellow at Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, and Research Associate, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self- Organization Go?ttingen (2006) an from 2006-2011 a Lewis-Sigler Theory Fellow at Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and Lecturer at the Department of Physics, Princeton University.