Animals adapt their behaviors according to their past experiences and changes in surrounding environment. This adaptation could be useful, but also harmful. Monoamine systems are thought to modulate such behavioral changes through their widespread projections across the brain, but the precise mechanisms of action remain mostly elusive.
By investigating learning behaviors in zebrafish, such as motor learning and addiction, we seek to reveal how whole-brain neural dynamics change during learning. We employ a virtual reality system and advanced optical microscopy to record neural activity from the entire brain at a single-cell resolution during learning behaviors and then assess that data obtained to determine how neural activity in monoamine systems orchestrate such brain-wide changes in neural dynamics.
Related literature:
[1] Kawashima et al.,
"The Serotonergic System Tracks the Outcomes of Actions to Mediate Short-Term Motor Learning"
Cell. 167(4):933–946.(2016)
[2] Freeman et al.,
“Mapping brain activity at scale with cluster computing.”
Nature Methods. 11(9):941-50 (2014).
[3] Vladimirov et al.,
“Light-sheet functional imaging in fictively behaving zebrafish.”
Nature Methods. 11(9):883-4 (2014).