Hippocampus

Given its essential role in learning and memory and simply organized anatomy, the hippocampus is one of the most heavily studied regions of the mammalian brain.

While a trisynaptic circuit organization (dentate gyrus-to-CA3-to-CA1) among the hippocampal principal cells has long been established, a complete census of its GABAergic cell types and their connectivity still remains elusive. 

We are combining high-throughput multi-cell patch recordings, morphological recovery, single-cell RNA sequencing, and state-of-the-art machine learning to catalogue the inhibitory interneuron types in the mouse hippocampus CA1 and determine the canonical connectivity rules between them and pyramidal cells.

The goal of the study is to provide a detailed blueprint of the cell type-specific wiring diagram of the local circuit of CA1, which will serve as a critical framework to decipher the role that local CA1 circuits play in computations such as memory formation.