The Neurobiology Course provides students with intense exposure to current cellular and molecular approaches to Neuroscience. It brings together students that have shown exceptional promise, with faculty that are leaders in their experimental disciplines, and provides the students with hands-on experience in the major experimental and intellectual approaches that are used in this field today. In addition to allowing the students to become very familiar with the experimental techniques it allows them the opportunity to devise and participate in specific research projects. The nine week course is divided into three sections of three weeks each, i) Physiology ii) Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and iii) Structure and Development. The Physiology section teaches the students the theories underlying the analysis of ion channel activity and synaptic transmission. It provides them with laboratory experience in voltage-clamp and patch clamp recordings in intact cells, single channel analysis, lipid bilayer reconstitution of ion channels, expression of cloned ion channels in. Xenopus oocytes and in cell lines, and recording from brain slices. The next section covers the biochemistry and genetics of neurotransmitter receptors and ion channels, synaptic vesicles and recycling mechanisms, second messenger pathways, neural growth factors and their signalling mechanisms and molecules involved in neuronal interactions with other cells. Experimental approaches during this time include protein purification, preparation of subcellular organelles and synaptosomes, methods for introduction of enzymes and other substances into neurons, neurotransmitter release assays, and the techniques of DNA cloning and mutagenesis. The final section, Structure and Development, instructs the students in the factors that determine the growth of neurons and glial cells, axonal pathfinding and plasticity, and the role of the neuronal cytoskeleton in these events. In the laboratory, they learn to generate primary cultures of neurons and to study their properties using fluorescent probes, immunocytochemistry, video-enhanced microscopy, confocal laser microscopy, electron microscopy, molecular shadowing and freeze-fracture techniques.
