Strowbridge Lab
Principal Investigator: Ben W Strowbridge
Institution: Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
A central question in neuroscience is how sensory stimuli in the environment are represented. The olfactory system is an attractive sensory modality to approach this question since the major excitatory pathways that connect receptor neurons, second-order mitral cells in the olfactory bulb, and tertiary neurons in olfactory cortex are well understood. However, intracellular recordings demonstrate that neural representations of odors in second-order neurons (mitral and tufted cells) do not result exclusively from feedforward input from receptor cells. Instead, the output of the olfactory bulb results from complex interactions between excitatory and inhibitory circuits. Relatively little is known about the neural circuits that generate inhibition onto principal cells. This proposal uses rodent brain slice recording methods to determine how local circuit pathways excite GABAergic olfactory bulb interneurons that shape the firing patterns in principal cells. Using both whole-cell intracellular recording and live 2-photon imaging methods, we will determine how the key synaptic pathways that enable sensory input to excite granule cells function. The proposed study will test the hypothesis…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DC004285-21: local circuits in the olfactory bulb (2026)
- 5R01DC004285-20: local circuits in the olfactory bulb (2025)
- 2R01DC004285-19A1: local circuits in the olfactory bulb (2024)
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