Скачать или смотреть Haining Zhong: climbing fibers encode decision information

It is increasingly appreciated that the cerebellum mediates reward, decision, and cognition functions in addition to motor functions. Cerebellar climbing fibers are thought to signal reward prediction errors in non-motor functions. However, it remains elusive what other information they may also convey. I will present our on-going work in which, by imaging postsynaptic responses of climbing fibers onto mouse Purkinje cell dendrites during auditory discrimination, we found that climbing fibers can also encode cue identities or perceptual choices. These responses were reshaped by reversal learning. The predictive nature of these signals suggests a feedforward role of climbing fibers in perceptual decision-making.

Haining Zhong received his double bachelor’s degrees in Biology and in Electronics and Computer Technologies from Tsinghua University in 1996. He did his Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Dr. King-Wai Yau at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and postdoctoral training with Drs. Karel Svoboda and Eric Betzig at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and then at the Janelia Research Campus. In 2010 he started his independent lab at the Vollum Institute and is currently a full professor/senior scientist at Vollum. Zhong lab develops imaging technologies and uses these technologies to study the cellular mechanisms underlying animal locomotion execution and learning. His lab has developed strategies, both based on mouse genetics and on CRISPR-based gene editing, to fluorescently label endogenous proteins for live imaging without overexpression. More recently, his lab pioneered in vivo imaging techniques to study neuromodulatory signaling activities, including cAMP, PKA and PKC, with cellular resolution in behaving animals. On the biology side, his work elucidates the spatiotemporal mechanisms underlying cAMP/PKA function and how this and other signaling pathways mediate cell-specific neuromodulatory regulation of circuit function during animal locomotion and decision.