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Thank you INCF for travel support

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My sincere thanks to INCF for supporting my travel expenses for the NCBS CAMP'14. We had a wonderful course. We were 30 participants including national and international students and 20-25 wait-listed students were selected for lecture only sessions.


The components in the course were well structured, which includes Remedial, Lectures, Tutorials, Discussions and Individual Projects. We got highly qualified faculty around the world to teach us the basis of memory and plasticity, various levels of modeling in computational neuroscience, sub-cellular electrical and chemical signaling in single neurons. And at network level we studied correlation and ion channel dynamics. How the spiking neuron network learns and memorizes the given patterns of information was one of the highlight of this course. 


Tutorial session was very helpful for me, it gave us detailed understanding of variety of simulation platform, which includes NEURON, MOOSE, NEST and BRIAN. Why we want to use particular simulator to solve specific research questions was well taught in the tutorials. 


Discussions were another interesting component of the course. We had hours of chat on computation in brain, parameters and models in Comp Neuro, etc. During the course we had lot of fun, discussing cable theory till 2am, one full day trip to Mysore and an evening trip for DBC,all were unforgettable.


During the course of study I did a project on “Studying the effect of stress on hippocampal microcircuit using LFP reconstruction”. Aim of the project was to use a hippocampal neuron model to check if the dendritic atrophy and cellular electrophysiological properties due to stress (Vyas et al., 2002, Narayanan and Chattarji, 2010 ) can explain the change in network activity (LFP, In-vivo) observed at several time points (Ghosh et al., 2013). 




Abstract of the work
Adapted version of CA3 PY neuron atrophy model (Narayanan and Chattarji, 2010) was used to study the effect of stress on single neuron field potential. To study the network activity,I built a small detailed network model of CA3 which consist of 100 PY neurons. Stress was induced to the individual neuron models in the network based on (Vyas et al., 2002, Narayanan and Chattarji, 2010) at various levels 0%(control),25%,35% (biologically observed) and 75%.Stimulated these neurons by injecting current through IClamp. LFP was restructured from the network model based on (Holt and Koch 1999, Parasuram et al, 2011). Observed that the amplitude and width of LFP wave get reduced at single neuron level as well as in the population LFP, this can be correlated to the increased evoked activity in hippocampus 1 hour after a single episode of stress. With repeated stress the evoked response comes down to the baseline, this could be because of damage to hippocampal neuron above 35%. 


I would like to thank Shona Chattarji(NCBS), Rishi Narayanan(IISc), Upi Bhalla(NCBS), TA‟s @ CAMP‟14 and Asha, Chaitanya (Amrita Univ.) for supporting me to complete this project.

Group picture at the end of the course, miss you guys!!!

-hari

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