Haoyang Du - Dr. Theodore Schwartz - Week4

 Dr. Schwartz have been traveling this week so no surgeries or patient seeing is performed. In this case, I shift my focus more towards the lab work. As the name suggests, Dr. Schwartz's Epilepsy Research Laboratory uses several models of neocortical epilepsy to study how seizures start and spread through the brain, neurovascular coupling mechanisms during epilepsy, and therapeutic approaches to treat, cure or prevent epilepsy. The current lab project I am working on aims to study the progression of seizure. The lab proposed a seizure spreading model, that besides simply spreading to peripheral cortical regions from the seizure focus, the seizure also spreads through the track of axon projections and thus to cortical regions with intensive connections to the seizure foci. In this model, the type of projection neuron is also important. When the projection from seizure focus is from excitatory neurons, the neural activity of downstream cortex will be thus further stimulated and triggers a large focal seizure, which has the possibility to further develop in to a new seizure foci. On the other hand, when the projection from seizure focus is from inhibitory neurons, the neural activity of downstream cortex will be inhibited, thus even the region is connected to the seizure foci, it will less likely to have a large increase in excitation. 

The lab utilize mouse lines with genetically expressed calcium indicators. The mice went through surgeries that will replace part of the skull with PDMS windows to allow optical access to capture the fluorescent signals from the calcium indicators. Acute seizure is induced from different methods and the cortical activity is captured through wide field imaging. For now, I have been helping with imaging data collection sessions and have also been doing craniotomys to prepare my own mouse for future data collection.