Brandeis’ reputation as an R1 research institution is what attracts so many of the university’s STEM students. A reason that Brandeis is able to offer such research opportunities is due to the numerous faculty-run laboratories that occur on campus, one of which just received a $1.35 million dollar grant (see our News section). Another fascinating laboratory at Brandeis is Dr. Christine Grienberger’s lab on the “Neural Mechanisms of Learning.”
The Grienberger Lab is studying the hippocampus region of the brain. Specifically, the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit that connects the entorhinal cortex to the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the region of the brain that is largely involved in spatial learning and episodic memory formation.
The hippocampus’s function in the brain was first discovered in 1953 because of Henry Molaison. Henry Molaison, known as Patient H.M., suffered from severe seizures. In order to treat the seizures, Molaison’s doctor performed a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy, where the doctor largely removed Molaison’s hippocampus. The treatment worked, but the unexpected side effect was Patient H.M.’s inability to form new episodic memories. Although this side effect clued scientists into the hippocampus’s importance to memory formation, the extent of how the neurons produce learning and memory is still unknown. Dr. Grienberger is hoping to further explore the unknowns that still remain in this field 73 years later.
Grienberger’s lab is researching the hippocampus by analyzing the three main pathways that lead into the region. To do this, the lab is watching which pathways of the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit are being created by the neurons when putting mice through different spatial learning tasks. The researchers are seeing which cells are activated during the task, and then slightly changing the tasks to see how new pathways are formed.
The lab is also utilizing award winning techniques in its research like optogenetics. This methodology, which just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, allows for Grienberger’s lab to activate or deactivate certain cells to further understand the nuance and contributions of the cells to pathways. The region the lab is studying has around 100,000 cells alone, so, even with the help of optogenetics, testing the combinations is a tedious task, but one that has the opportunity to discover something critical.
Neuroscience has tremendously advanced since Dr. Grienberger entered the science world, but she explains that knowing how a healthy brain works is crucial to then understanding how a diseased one works. The more we know about the brain, an organ of which we know so little, the more drug development can be based on logic rather than trial and error. Dr. Grienberger’s lab is creating real resources for the broader science world that may even potentially find its way into the right developer’s hands.
The brain is a network of neural cells called neurons communicating with each other as a means of processing information. This happens when the dendrites of a neuron receive signals from another neuron, and this signal becomes an electrical impulse that travels down the axon to the synapses that then send the information to other neurons. These connections between different neurons can change when new information is learned. By studying the nuances of the neural pathways and connections involving the hippocampus, the Grienberger Lab hopes to understand the importance of certain neurons and pathways and how they contribute to learning and memory formation.
