As a newly-appointed assistant professor my immediate career objective is to get a strong research program going in my laboratory. My intellectual interest is in understanding mechanisms of specificity in the autonomic nervous system and how those mechanisms arise during development. Thus my long-term career objective is to develop a strong lab committed to elucidating these aspects of neurobiology. The Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Vermont is an excellent place for the pursuit of these goals since the strength of the department lies in a multi-disciplinary approach with several labs exploring questions relevant to the autonomic nervous system. Moreover, there is a strong autonomic research component in the departments of Pharmacology, Physiology and Psychology. The complexity of the autonomic nervous system, in particular the interposition of a ganglionic relay between the central nervous system and the periphery, precludes any easy determination of the neural circuitry involved in the differential control of autonomic functions. The proposed experiments circumvent this problem by providing a way to study the innervation of target-identified ganglion cells or preganglionic neurons. The approach is to label specific neuronal groups by placing a retrogradely transported fluorescent dye in their target. Individual retrogradely labeled neurons are then intracellularly filled, under direct visual control, with the marking enzyme horseradish peroxidase (HRP) to delineate their dendritic arborizations. Immunohistochemical and electron microscopic analysis of target-identified, HRP-filled cells will determine whether specific types of inputs are related to particular functions at either the ganglionic or preganglionic level. The significance of these experiments lies in their potential for providing basic insight into the chemical nature of specific interactions in the autonomic nervous system.
