SCIENCE at the Edge

Interdisciplinary Physics Seminar

 

Friday April 24, 11:30 a.m. with refreshments served at 11:15 a.m. 1400 BPS, Biomedical Physical Sciences Building

 

 

Mark Reimers, MSU Neuroscience Program

 

Balance Between Excitatory and Inhibitory Signaling in the Human Brain: Data and Models

 

Theoretical and experimental work has suggested that matching of excitation to inhibition is crucial for brain function. Nevertheless individual variation in expression of key genes encoding inhibitory GABA-A receptors is surprisingly high. Such high variation raises questions about how the brain can compensate. We find in all human brain gene expression data sets that excitatory glutamate receptor mRNA levels co-vary tightly with those of GABA-A receptors over a wide range. Furthermore these levels are the best predictors of variation in hundreds of other synaptic genes. Finally schizophrenia risk is ten times higher at the low end of the range.

 

The gamma rhythm is a key indicator of cortical function, found in all people, although schizophrenic patients show modest deficits. Nevertheless existing simulation are not robust to the high variation in key parameters evidenced in data. We find that the key to a robust model of gamma is to use a realistic highly skewed connectivity distribution as recently shown experimentally; this makes a more robust rhythm by better matching excitation to inhibition.

 

Mark Reimers MSU Neuroscience Program

 

 

 

Shawna Prater / Secretary

Astrophysics Group

Michigan State University

567 Wilson Road, Room 3261

Biomedical Physical Sciences Bldg

East Lansing, MI 48824-2320

Ph: (517) 884-5601 Fax (517) 432-8802

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