Kato Lab
Principal Investigator: Hiroyuki Kato
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY How our brain achieves coherent perception by integrating information from parallel sensory pathways distributed across space and time remains a central question in neuroscience. In the auditory system, sound information reaches the cortex via the lemniscal (“primary”) and non-lemniscal (“secondary”) pathways. The non-lemniscal pathways have often been described as slower integrators of multi-sensory information, in contrast to the roles of the lemniscal pathways as fast and reliable relays for sound inputs. However, the contribution of the non-lemniscal pathways in driving fast cortical responses and how they interact with the lemniscal pathways during sound processing are still matters of debate. Our preliminary electrophysiology experiments show that layer 6 (L6) of not only the primary but also the secondary auditory cortex receives sound inputs whose latency can be shorter than the L4 lemniscal inputs. Surprisingly, our retrograde tracing demonstrates that this short-latency L6 input originates from the non-tonotopic parts of the auditory thalamus, supporting the role of the non-lemniscal pathway in fast sensory processing. Building on this exciting finding, we…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01NS128873-03: Cortical circuits for the integration of parallel short-latency auditory pathways (2026)
- 4R01NS128873-02: Cortical circuits for the integration of parallel short-latency auditory pathways (2025)
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