The overall purpose of this project is to understand how spontaneous electrical signaling is generated in the developing brain. Through work of this laboratory and others, it is now understood that spontaneous electrical activity occurs at specific stages of brain development and regulates many important aspects of brain development. For these functions to be carried out, this activity must start at the right time so that it can interact efficiently with other aspects of brain development, and it must stop at the right time so that the ability of the brain to process sensory and motor information can appear on schedule. Our experiments during the last year have shown that spontaneous activity in the newborn mouse brain turns itself off. Experiments in the present project test the idea that this activity also turns itself on--that is, that small amounts of electrical activity are required for high levels of spontaneous activity to appear at the right developmental stage. Recent experiments have also shown that spontaneous activity in the newborn mouse brain is driven by a specific set of pacemaker neurons that initiate activity and then spread it across the entire brain. The second study in this project will characterize the unique physiological properties of these pacemaker nerve cells that give them this pacemaking ability. All of these experiments will be done with a combination of single-cell electrical recording and optical imaging methods.
The PI created and directs the Undergraduate Neurobiology Major at the University of Washington. This program has a close link between classroom studies and research, and 95% of its students engage in independent research. The small size and close student-faculty contact in the program provide an excellent mentoring environment for minority students. The PI has sponsored 7 undergraduates from this program in his laboratory in the past 3 years. Members of underrepresented minorities are actively recruited. Such students constitute about 15% of the undergraduate majors in Neurobiology.
