Publications by authors named "Matthew Van De Poll"
Article Synopsis
- General anesthetics, like propofol and isoflurane, disrupt brain activity by enhancing inhibition and blocking neurotransmitter release at certain synapses.
- Research focused on how isoflurane affects different neurotransmitter systems showed that it mainly impaired the release of neurotransmitters at excitatory cholinergic synapses.
- In contrast, isoflurane had minimal impact on inhibitory GABAergic and glutamatergic synapses, indicating a selective inhibitory effect in the brain during general anesthesia.
Article Synopsis
- Researchers have used electroencephalograms to identify sleep stages in humans and mammals, but this method isn't applicable to invertebrates like flies.
- The study involved long-term recordings of local brain activity in flies during sleep, revealing distinct sleep stages through machine learning analysis.
- Key findings show that certain sleep stages correspond with specific behaviors (like rhythmic proboscis extensions), and the brain's activity patterns are different between sleep and wakefulness during these behaviors.
Whole-Brain Electrophysiology and Calcium Imaging in during Sleep and Wake.
Cold Spring Harb Protoc
September 2024
Article Synopsis
- Sleep is a whole-brain phenomenon, impacting various functions across the brain, including metabolite clearance and synaptic maintenance due to all neurons producing waste.
- Research with fruit flies indicates that the diverse functions of sleep are conserved in different animals, suggesting a fundamental role of sleep across species.
- Advanced recording techniques in flies, similar to EEG and fMRI in humans, enable comprehensive analysis of neural activity during sleep, highlighting the significance of multidimensional data in understanding sleep physiology.
Article Synopsis
- Genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) are used to noninvasively monitor neuronal activity in live organisms, including studying sleep patterns in model organisms like flies.
- This text outlines a detailed methodology for tracking neuron activity in the fly brain using two-photon microscopy, including surgical preparation for long-term recordings and methods for optogenetic stimulation of neurons.
- The protocol also provides strategies for recording neural activity from different areas of the fly's head and offers guidelines for analyzing complex data gathered during spontaneous and induced sleep conditions.
Sleep studies in rely mostly on behavioral read-outs to support molecular or circuit-level investigations in this model. Electrophysiology can provide an additional level of understanding in these studies to, for example, investigate changes in brain activity associated with sleep manipulations. In this protocol, we describe a procedure for performing multichannel local field potential (LFP) recordings in the fruit fly, with a flexible system that can be adapted to different experimental paradigms and situations.
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- Sleep is common in most animals, indicating it serves important biological functions, but the exact purpose of sleep remains unclear due to its complexity across species.
- Researchers studied the brain activity of flies during spontaneous sleep using long-term multichannel local field potential (LFP) recordings, which allowed them to analyze differences between sleep and wake states.
- Using machine learning, they identified unique sleep stages in flies and discovered specific brain activity patterns linked to micro-behaviors, revealing that some behaviors, like rhythmic proboscis extensions, have distinct brain state correlates when asleep compared to when awake.
Balancing Prediction and Surprise: A Role for Active Sleep at the Dawn of Consciousness?
Front Syst Neurosci
November 2021
The brain is a prediction machine. Yet the world is never entirely predictable, for any animal. Unexpected events are surprising, and this typically evokes prediction error signatures in mammalian brains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual decision making in animals is influenced by innate preferences as well as experience. Interaction between hard-wired responses and changing motivational states determines whether a visual stimulus is attractive, aversive or neutral. It is, however, difficult to separate the relative contribution of nature versus nurture in experimental paradigms, especially for more complex visual parameters such as the shape of objects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpontaneous patterns of activity in the developing visual system may play an important role in shaping the brain for function. During the period 4-9 dpf (days post-fertilization), larval zebrafish learn to hunt prey, a behavior that is critically dependent on the optic tectum. However, how spontaneous activity develops in the tectum over this period and the effect of visual experience are unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClosed-loop paradigms provide an effective approach for studying visual choice behaviour and attention in small animals. Different flying and walking paradigms have been developed to investigate behavioural and neuronal responses to competing stimuli in insects such as bees and flies. However, the variety of stimulus choices that can be presented over one experiment is often limited.
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