The brain is the most marvelous and complicated organ that governs the body. What we see and hear, how we think, what we remember and dream are endowed by the 3-pound structure in the skull. Cells in the brain talk and form a network that receives various sensory stimulation (images, sounds, touches, or smells) from the outside world, perform complex yet high-speed calculations and generate corresponding reactions. Creatures even as small as mice can quickly sniff out threatening signals. They could run from danger just by peeking at the lengthened shadow of a predator or overhearing the movement in the bush.
Intuitively, maybe the escape behavior looks simple. Accomplish this process require several steps:
- Hear or see the alarming signal.
- Judge the valence (safe/danger) of the stimuli.
- Design the behavior and performance, which finished within a blink.
Neuroscience is attractive and sophisticated. Revealing the mystery embedded in the brain requires a collaborative effort from many fields, e.g., biochemistry, biophysics, engineering, computer science, microbiology, optics, immunology. Technique advances in the last decades accelerated our understanding of the function of neurocircuits in a way we have never been able to. Transgenic animal models and viral tools bridge the gaps between molecular profile, single neuronal activity, and behavior performance.
In the past years, we have pioneered in applying in vivo whole-cell voltage-clamp recording to reveal at the synaptic connection level how the excitatory and inhibitory synaptic interplay determines the sensory response/processing properties. We have now integrated a broad spectrum of approaches, including in vivo and in vitro electrophysiology, two-photon calcium imaging, neural modeling, anatomical tracing, and optogenetics, to understand neural circuits composed of different cell types.