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Picture Caption: Optical imaging of excitation of a mouse heart encoding a Ca2+ reporter transgene. The image is from a series taken every ms during a spontaneous beat. Research/Long description: Genetically encoded sensors can serve as ways to understand lineage specific cell function in a complex biological context by providing molecular scale information in vivo. Contributed by: Michael Kotlikoff

Research/Photo Gallery

Other gallery pictures

Shown here is a male beaugregory damselfish courting a female who is in a bottle. Males are given territories made of PVC piping (artificial nest sites) which are considered high-quality nests by males and females. Males on these sites dramatically increase their reproduction, courtship, and aggression levels over males on natural nest sites. We test the effects of neuropeptides on these behaviors as well as the male's vocalizations.

New cells (black), many of them neurons, continue to form throughout life in many parts of the brains of birds. Here they are dividing in a zone of the hippocampus next to the ventricle, in an adult chickadee. As they mature, these cells migrate away from the venticle and deep into the hippocampus. Grad student Bernard Tarr has found that changes in the birds' housing environment can affect the volume of the hippocampus. He is now determining whether this treatment also affects the survival or destination of such new cells. Contributed by: Timothy J. DeVoogd

This shows a 3rd instar larvae that has been dissected to show the musculature and the nervous system. The two white circles are the brain lobes, and the oval below it is the ganglion, where all the axons reach out to innervate muscles.

The pressures of evolution have maximized the brain's processing speed and metabolic efficiency. Therefore, to understand why neurons in early visual cortex respond to specific visual patterns, you simply have to learn an appropriate efficient code. Here, we used independent components analysis (ICA) on a series of whitened image patches taken from pictures of natural scenes - rocks, trees, fields... For each filter, the "neuron" will fire if the image is bright on the bright spots and dark on the dark spots (more precisely, it's a linear filter). Some of these resemble simple cells in early visual cortex, as they have a characteristic oriented bright/dark pattern (like 2-D gabor functions, to be more precise). The idea is that the more filters derived from an efficient coding of natural scenes resemble those of neurons in early visual cortex, the better we understand how the brain processes visual input. For a more thorough understanding please visit http://emva.net/educational/introduction.html Contributed by: Mark V. Albert

A convict cichlid male (left) and female (right) pair providing care for their offspring. These monogamous fish have a specific parental division of labor with males defending territories and protecting offspring from intruders while females provide direct offspring care. These fish will combine their efforts to raise their offspring to independence. We test the neural phenotype with regards to neuropeptides of single and paired individuals, as well as these neuropeptides effects on their parental care ability.

Please report corrections, questions, comments, and problems to: Lori Miller (lmm8 AT cornell.edu)