Organization of the Vertebrate Retina (Part 2)
12 Noon, CS Conference Room (Harold Frank Hall, Room 1132).
Professor Dowling will giving a general overview of the vertebrate retina, focusing especially on its functional organization. This is intended to be an informal presentation so that the audience can ask questions, raise issues, and participate in the discussions.
About the speaker:
Dr. John E. Dowling received his Ph.D. degree in Biology from Harvard University in 1961. He is presently Llura & Gordon Gund Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard, and Professor of Ophthalmology (Neuroscience), Harvard Medical School.
Early in his career, Dowling worked as a researcher under Nobel Prize winner George Wald. During this time, Dowling mapped the exchange of retinoids between the retinal photoreceptors where they are used in photoreception and the pigment epithelial cell where the retinoids are stored. Because of Dowling's work, this process is now described in
all biology textbooks. In addition, Dowling's groundbreaking work on the functional organization of the retina laid the foundation for understanding how the retina begins to integrate and analyze visual information. Dowling has received numerous awards including the Friedenwald Medal, the highest scientific award from the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science.
Dr. Dowling has published many books, including the classic "The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain," Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1987); "Neurons and Networks: An Introduction to Neuroscience, " Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1992); and "Creating Mind: How the Brain Works," W. W. Norton & Co., New York, NY (1998).
Presentation slides from John Dowling for "Organization of the Vertebrate Retina"
PDF: Dowling_Retina.pdf
PPT: Dowling_Retina.ppt
Organization of the Vertebrate Retina
12 Noon, CS Conference Room (Harold Frank Hall, Room 1132).
Professor Dowling will giving a general overview of the vertebrate retina, focusing especially on its functional organization. This is intended to be an informal presentation so that the audience can ask questions, raise issues, and participate in the discussions.
About the speaker:
Dr. John E. Dowling received his Ph.D. degree in Biology from Harvard University in 1961. He is presently Llura & Gordon Gund Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard, and Professor of Ophthalmology (Neuroscience), Harvard Medical School.
Early in his career, Dowling worked as a researcher under Nobel Prize winner George Wald. During this time, Dowling mapped the exchange of retinoids between the retinal photoreceptors where they are used in photoreception and the pigment epithelial cell where the retinoids are stored. Because of Dowling's work, this process is now described in
all biology textbooks. In addition, Dowling's groundbreaking work on the functional organization of the retina laid the foundation for understanding how the retina begins to integrate and analyze visual information. Dowling has received numerous awards including the Friedenwald Medal, the highest scientific award from the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science.
Dr. Dowling has published many books, including the classic "The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain," Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1987); "Neurons and Networks: An Introduction to Neuroscience, " Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1992); and "Creating Mind: How the Brain Works," W. W. Norton & Co., New York, NY (1998).
Presentation slides from John Dowling for "Organization of the Vertebrate Retina"
PDF: Dowling_Retina.pdf
PPT: Dowling_Retina.ppt
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Determinants of Dendritic Morphology, Connectivity, Spacing and Functional Coverage of Retinal Nerve Cells
Prof. Benjamin Reese
July 23, 2007
Abstract:
My lab has been exploring the determinants of dendritic morphology, connectivity and intercellular spacing that underlie the functional coverage of retinal nerve cell mosaics.Recent studies have focused on the horizontal cells of the retina, being inhibitory interneurons with dendritic fields that overlap one another, contacting the pedicles of cone photoreceptors.Because of their regular spacing, their dendrites provide a uniform coverage of the retinal surface.The developmental mechanisms establishing their intercellular spacing and morphological properties are undefined, but fate-determination events and cell-intrinsic instructions have been suggested to underlie these features. I will consider an alternative hypothesis, that interactions with neighboring cells drive the intercellular spacing and dendritic differentiation of these cells. Using a variety of natural and genetically-modified strains of mice, we have modulated the relationship between horizontal and cone cell number to study the role of homotypic and afferent density upon mosaic patterning and differentiation. A number of spatial statistics for analyzing the patterning of retinal mosaics in 2D will be discussed. Variation in horizontal cell density is shown to produce a corresponding change in the average spacing between horizontal cells and in the size of the dendritic field, while altering cone density leaves dendritic field size unaffected and does not perturb mosaic patterning, but drives higher order dendritic branching and terminal clustering. Afferent and homotypic interactions therefore generate the network properties of horizontal cells that underlie their functional coverage. Such issues have not been addressed within networks of nerve cells within the brain for a variety of reasons, partly because determining such spatial statistics in 3D is computationally demanding, and because of the difficulty in visualizing nerve cell patterning in 3D. At the end of the talk, I will describe the creation of new software tools permitting the analysis and modeling of such nerve cell patterning in three dimensions.
Imaging Solutions for Problems in Anatomic Pathology
Dr. David Rimm
Department of Pathology at the Yale University School of Medicine
April 18th, 2007
Professor Rimm will talk about using spectral imaging and fluorescence-based automated quantitative analysis to address current medical problems in anatomic pathology. The problems addressed will be the problem of atypical cells and pre-malignancy in cytopathology and the problem of accurate protein measurement as a mechanism to predict response to targeted therapies or to predict metastasis in breast cancer and melanoma.
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