Brain Circuit Function and Dysfunction

The Focus Group around  Rudolf Mößbauer Tenure Track Professor Ruben Portugues works on understanding the brain circuitry that underlies behavior, how this is established during development, and how it is affected during natural processes such as learning and disease or injury. We use a highly interdisciplinary approach that stems from neuroimaging experiments we perform, during which we monitor the activity of all 100,000 individual neurons in a larval zebrafish, with single-cell resolution and at a rate of two brains per second. By designing virtual reality environments and behavioral assays during which we present stimuli and monitor behavior, we probe processes such as decision-making, learning, navigation, and attention. These experiments generate large data sets that we analyze and use to generate circuit hypotheses, which we further probe with electrophysiology, optogenetics, modeling, and behavioral experiments. These experiments offer a unique possibility within vertebrate model organisms to investigate neuronal processing from sensory perception to motor action, across scales that range from individual synapses to the whole brain and across multiple behavioral paradigms, while retaining the ability to perturb these circuits and assess their robustness and recovery.