Light sheet microscopy is a powerful technique to perform fast volumetric imaging. I will talk about how we use it to investigate how the brain of a small vertebrate, the larval zebrafish, works. In our laboratory at the Technical University of Munich, we are interested in how the brain processes external sensory stimuli and uses internal states and past experiences to select appropriate behavior. In order to do this, we image the activity of almost all 100,000 neurons in the brain of larval zebrafish while we present the animals with stimuli and monitor their behavior. I will also discuss the data processing steps after acquiring these large datasets.
Presenter: Ruben Portugues, PhD
Institute of Neuroscience, Technical University of Munich
Portugues is a neurobiologist studying sensorimotor control. His research group uses behavior, modeling, optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology, and whole brain functional calcium imaging to dissect learning, memory, and action selection in the larval zebrafish.
Prof. Portugues studied mathematics and did his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. After a short postdoctoral fellowship in physics at Centro de Estudios Cientificos in Valdivia, Chile, he joined Professor Florian Engert’s laboratory at Harvard University and switched research interests to neuroscience. In 2014 he was appointed Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried. Since 2020 Prof. Portugues is an assistant professor at the TUM.
