Antwerp Neuroscience Seminar.
Promotion zaal (Aula UIA)
June 10, 2002, 17.00
Cornelius Schwarz
Eberhard-Karls-Universitaet Tuebingen
Germany
Connecting two different worlds. The functional architecture of the cerebro-cerebellar pathway.
The talk will give an overview of characteristics of the cerebro-cerebellar pathway which - via the pontine nuclei - bridges the two major cortical structures in the mammalian brain: the neocortex and the cerebellum. I will first try to work out a functional framework for the pontine nuclei necessary to interface the two entirely different strategies of signal processing residing in neocortical and cerebellar networks. I will then introduce experiments from our lab which were focussed on elucidating the spatial parameters of the brain map present in the pontine nuclei. These studies have been the basis of a first functional hypothesis which predicts the functional coupling between signals of wide spread neocortical origin represented in the fine grained, compartmentalized map in the pontine nuclei. The last part of the talk will describe our current strategy to test this hypothesis using multi neuron recordings in rats performing a sensorimotor task.