Diversity of piriform cortex neuron identity

[Remi-Gau]

Added as an issue for book keeping

Source: https://brainhack.ch/

Team Leaders:

ferreira clothilde

Our project aims to understand the development of neurons forming the piriform cortex in mammals. The piriform is a structure and is involved in the perception and integration of odour information in the brain. This structure is part of the so-called paleo-cortex, a part of the brain that appeared earlier in evolution compared with the Neocortex that integrates inputs from the other sensory modalities, such as touch or vision. As little information is available about the neurons populating this brain region, the goal of our study is to characterize the neuronal diversity and identity composing it. In order to produce a multidimensional description of these cells, we carried out single cell transcriptomics alongside with PatchSeq, a technique that allows to retrieve electrophysiological features, morphology and transcriptomics at a single cell level. With this technique, we collected over 100 neurons for which we successfully obtained electrophysiological recording by whole cell patch-clamp, morphology by diffusion of biocytin and transcriptomic by nuclei aspiration through the patch pipet for sequencing. From the morphological information we have imaged all neurons and their morphology was reconstructed in 3D with Imaris software and we would highly benefit from inputs on how to unbiasedly classify the morphology types present in our dataset. The final aim is to integrate all the 3 modalities into a single dataset and create links between electrophysiology, morphology and gene expression. We are looking forward to collaborate