Integrated Calendar

Homeostatic synaptic scaling is thought to occur cell-wide, but recent evidence suggests this form of stabilizing plasticity can be implemented more locally in reduced preparations. To investigate the spatial scales of plasticity in vivo, we used repeated two-photon imaging in mouse visual cortex after sensory deprivation to measure TNF-α dependent increases in spine size as a proxy for synaptic scaling in vivo in both excitatory and inhibitory neurons. We found that after sensory deprivation, increases in spine size are restricted to a subset of dendritic branches, which we confirmed using immunohistochemistry. We found that the dendritic branches that had individual spines that increased in size following deprivation, also underwent a decrease in spine density. Within a given dendritic branch, the degree of spine size increases is proportional to recent spine loss within that branch. Using computational simulations, we show that this compartmentalized form of synaptic scaling better retained the previously established input-output relationship in the cell, while restoring activity levels. We then investigated the relationship between new spines that form after this spine loss and strengthening and find that their spatial positioning facilitates strengthening of maintained synapses.

Google Accelerated Sciences is a translational research team that brings Google's technological expertise to the scientific community. Recent advances in machine learning have delivered incredible results in consumer applications (e.g. photo recognition, language translation), and is now beginning to play an important role in life sciences. Taking examples from active collaborations in the biochemical, biological, and biomedical fields, I will focus on how our team transforms science problems into data problems and applies Google's scaled computation, data-driven engineering, and machine learning to accelerate discovery.

For the past several years, a main focus of the UCSC browser group has been developing data organization and display features in response to the massive expansion of data quantity and variety in the genomics field. There will be a short talk covering recent features motivated by these issues, highlighting two of the newest - the Track Collection Builder tool, and the new pairwise interaction ('interact') track type. This will be followed by a quick tour through some not-so-obvious browser features such as exon-only display, isoform hiding, highlights, and track reordering. There will be ample time for questions, reflections and suggestions about browser features and data.

TBA