Imaging dendrites across wake and sleep: fiberoptic measurements of calcium activity in freely behaving animals

Project Information

PERISLEEP

Grant agreement ID: 268273

Project closed

Start date 1 September 2012

End date 31 August 2016

Funded under

• Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Total cost € 100 000,00

EU contribution € 100 000,00

Coordinated by

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN
Germany

Objective

The aim of this project is to look at changes in dendritic calcium activity during sleep and how these changes are influenced by waking experience in freely behaving animals. Sleep promotes brain plasticity and processes dependent upon plasticity (i.e. memory consolidation). But the cellular events that mediate these effects are poorly understood. We hypothesize that sleep promotes brain plasticity by increasing synaptic activity locally. We will test this hypothesis by looking at changes in in vivo dendritic calcium transients during sleep (Aim1) and sleep-dependent cortical plasticity (Aim2) in freely behaving animals. This will be achieved by combining EEG/EMG polysomnography recording and fiberoptic imaging techniques. More specifically, we will look at changes in calcium activity from the apical tuft dendrite of layer 5 pyramidal neurons. Dendrites are the main site of information processing and integration therefore changes observe over the sleep-wake cycle will contribute to a better understanding of synaptic function in the intact brain (Aim1). Changes in dendritic calcium levels are also directly linked to neuronal activity and can predict the polarity of plastic changes (e.g. synaptic potentiation vs. depression). Therefore, we expect that challenging the brain during wakefulness will modify dendritic activity during subsequent sleep. To test this hypothesis, we will quantify dendritic calcium activity during sleep following 2 different experience-dependent plasticity paradigms leading to either potentiation (enriched environment) or depression (monocular deprivation) in primary visual cortex (Aim2). The proposed research would be the first to assess directly the effect of sleep, experience-dependent plasticity and sleep-dependent plasticity on in vivo dendritic calcium activity in freely behaving animal.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• natural sciences › chemical sciences › inorganic chemistry › alkaline earth metals
• natural sciences › computer and information sciences › data science › data processing

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Programme(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE - Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Topic(s)

• FP7-PEOPLE-2009-RG - Marie Curie Action: "Reintegration Grants"

Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

MC-IRG - International Re-integration Grants (IRG)

Coordinator

HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN

• EU contribution: € 100 000,00
• Address: UNTER DEN LINDEN 6 ; 10117 Berlin ; Germany
• Region: Berlin › Berlin › Berlin
• Activity type: Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
• Total cost: No data