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Our study published in Elife: How serotonin balances internal brain activity and external visual input

By combining state-of-the-art optogenetics, wide-field optical imaging, electrophysiology and pharmacological manipulations in vivo, the authors show that serotonergic neurons modulate both spontaneous and visually evoked responses by two separable cellular mechanisms. This study highlights an important, yet less examined role of serotonin in sensory processing.

This research was done in close collaboration with the group of Stefan Herlitze, Dept. of General Zoology and Neurobiology, and primarily funded by the SFB 874.

For full press release please visit https://news.rub.de/english/press-releases/2020-04-07-optogenetics-how-serotonin-balances-communication-within-brain

To read the article online https://elifesciences.org/articles/53552


The Institut für Neuroinformatik (INI) is a central research unit of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. We aim to understand the fundamental principles through which organisms generate behavior and cognition while linked to their environments through sensory systems and while acting in those environments through effector systems. Inspired by our insights into such natural cognitive systems, we seek new solutions to problems of information processing in artificial cognitive systems. We draw from a variety of disciplines that include experimental approaches from psychology and neurophysiology as well as theoretical approaches from physics, mathematics, electrical engineering and applied computer science, in particular machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision.

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