Publications by authors named "Theo Walker"
Article Synopsis
- Functional circuits in the visual cortex rely on the interplay between excitatory and inhibitory neurons, with research in mice revealing a "local non-specific pooling principle" for inhibitory connectivity.
- New findings in ferret visual cortex indicate that inhibitory neurons respond selectively to oriented stimuli, contradicting the idea of untuned inhibitory neuron inputs based on random pooling.
- The study suggests that the functioning of excitatory-inhibitory interactions may differ in species with a columnar organization, like ferrets, and implies the non-specific pooling principle may not apply broadly to non-murine species.
Columnar organization of orientation selectivity and clustered horizontal connections linking orientation columns are two of the distinctive organizational features of primary visual cortex in many mammalian species. However, the functional role of these connections has been harder to characterize. Here we examine the extent and nature of horizontal interactions in V1 of the tree shrew using optical imaging of intrinsic signals, optogenetic stimulation, and multi-unit recording.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation: Advances in the field of cheminformatics have been hindered by a lack of freely available tools. We have created Chembench, a publicly available cheminformatics portal for analyzing experimental chemical structure-activity data. Chembench provides a broad range of tools for data visualization and embeds a rigorous workflow for creating and validating predictive Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship models and using them for virtual screening of chemical libraries to prioritize the compound selection for drug discovery and/or chemical safety assessment.
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