2018

Kay Tye, PhD, is a neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at MIT. Her cutting-edge science has garnered prestigious awards, including the McKnight Scholar Award from 2015-2018. Her lab studies the neural circuit mechanisms of emotions and motivated behaviors in mice, and she’s been one of the neuroscientists collaborating with Inscopix to apply nVoke, our game-changing all-optical

What is a dream? This is a question that has been asked by people for thousands of years. Dreams have played crucial roles in affecting individual’s behaviors and even affecting the human history in a “supernatural” manner. The biological understanding of dreams was not available until the last century. With the contributions by many scientists,

February brought a number of blockbuster papers related to neural circuit research, including two papers that applied Inscopix technology. The behaviors studied ranged from motor learning, sleep, decision-making, fear, thirst, hunting, predation, and evasion. Plus there’s a novel genetically encoded fluorescent voltage reporter this month! Two of the papers have videos that accompany them, so

For our latest podcast, we had the honor of interviewing one of the most influential leaders in biomedical research today, the President of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Dr. Cori Bargmann. Cori is also the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor at Rockefeller University. Cori has dedicated her research career to understanding the genetic and

At Inscopix, we take immense pride in the scientific success of our community members. Recently, we had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Anatol Kreitzer (Gladstone Institutes/UCSF) about the tour-de-force study from his lab published in Cell last week. This paper investigated the role of a small population of striatal neurons, the GABAergic Fast-Spiking Interneurons (FSIs),

It’s the first must-read list for neural circuit research articles in 2018, and the line-up of papers include work on circuits coding for movements to fear and anxiety. Four publications last month used Inscopix nVista technology! Happy reading! 1. Dopamine neuron activity before action initiation gates and invigorates future movements by Joaquim Alves da Silva,

The hippocampus mediates learning and memory, and since it receives its inputs from many areas, including the cortex and limbic system, it integrates vast types of information which can be paired with stimuli during learning. For example, a mouse can learn to fear a neutral environment if it is paired with an annoying stimuli, like

The story of mental health management is a challenging one to tell. For sure, we don’t talk enough about it as a society, and we don’t yet know enough about the biology, the causes, or the best ways to diagnose and treat mental illness. While the true numbers affected are difficult to precisely determine, those

It’s our final must-read list for 2017! These are the papers published in December that stood out as relevant to the community of neuroscientists studying neural circuits. Happy New Year! 1. Combined Social and Spatial Coding in a Descending Projection from the Prefrontal Cortex by Malavika Murugan, Hee Jae Jang, Michelle Park, Ellia M. Miller,