Session A: June 18 - July 20, 2012 (5 weeks)
Monday-Saturday (Mon-Fri 8:30 am-5 pm, plus Sat morning 8:30 am-noon, except final week no Saturday meeting)
Arrive Sunday, June 17 after 3 pm, depart Friday, July 20 after lunch. Dr. James Murray
California State University, East Bay
Biological Sciences
Dr. Russell Wyeth
St. Francis Xavier University
Department of Biology
Dr. Shaun Cain
Eastern Oreg
on University
Department of Biology
This 5-week graduate course will focus on learning techniques in neuroethological research such as behavioral recording and analysis, electrophysiology of intact and reduced preparations, and pharmacology, immunohistochemistry, and confocal microscopy of neural structures. Each pair of students will explore a project that helps them to learn the techniques they need in their own research. The course research will focus on the nudibranch sea slug Tritonia diomedea because of its amenability to neuroethological analysis and use as a teaching model. Lectures will focus primarily on background necessary to understand fundamental techniques in neurophysiology as well as behavioural analysis. This course is one of very few advanced courses offered worldwide on advanced topics in the neurobiology of behavior. Neuroscience, like molecular biology and genetics, has tended over recent decades to emphasize reductionistic techniques that have been extremely fruitful in illuminating the basic principles of how cells function and interact in nervous systems. But now we find that our ability to collect large data sets of recordings from dozens or hundreds of nerve cells have often outstripped our ability to relate these data back to the behavior of the organism, and ultimately to the ecological context of that behavior. The sea slug Tritonia has served as a model system both in this reductionist approach, and also in a complementary neuroethological approach that focuses more on relating the activities of multiple nerve cells to behavior in a natural context. In particular, the system is ripe for an integrative analysis of how the animals orient using multimodal sensory cues and how their brains make ecologically-relevant decisions on a cellular level (e.g. how does a slug decide to turn right or left if it smells both food and predator). Students will be paired for 4-week projects, each pair with its own "rig" of electrophysiological equipment. The rigs will include neural activity amplifiers, digitization equipment to record data onto computers, microscopes to help guide the recording electrodes, and other devices as necessary. We will instruct students in techniques such as intracellular recording, single-cell inactivation, whole nerve recording, and fine-wire recording in freely-moving animals. We will also teach students how digital video can be used to record and quantitatively analyze many aspects of behaviour how to correlate these data with neural activity. Possibilities include tracking animal movement and measuring components body movement, amongst others. Students will be exposed to lesion experiments that isolate behavioural function to specific neurons (through drug inactivation) or parts of the nervous system (by nerve cuts) by comparing behaviors between sham-operated animals with that of lesioned animals. Students will also learn to label specific nerve cells using iontophoresis of fluorescent tracers, to immunolabel neural markers, and to process tissue for confocal microscopy. Neuroethology has historically been characterized by a focus on comparative, interdisciplinary, integrative, evolutionary, and ecologically-relevant approaches. FHL has a long tradition of emphasizing these approaches and is an ideal location for the study of the neuroethology of navigation in Tritonia and other sea slugs.
