Ikuko Smith
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Neuroscience
A single neuron does more than add up its inputs. Its branching dendrites, the tree-like extensions that receive signals from other neurons, can filter, boost and combine electrical signals before they reach the cell body.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
Biophysics
- Topics
dendrites
dendritic spikes
dendritic integration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Determine how synaptic inputs onto distal dendrites relate to dendritic spiking in vivo, using direct dendritic recordings together with two-photon calcium imaging of individual inputs.
- Measure how effectively dendritic spikes trigger axonal action potentials by recording intracellular electrical activity from dendrites and their parent cell bodies during sensory processing.
- Define how dendritic spikes sculpt a neuron's receptive field, the sensory features it responds to, using electrophysiology, two-photon imaging and light-based optogenetic control.
More about the research
Dendrites can even fire their own self-propagating electrical spikes, much as axons do. That could give each neuron far more computing power. Yet it remains unclear how these active dendritic mechanisms are used in a living, behaving animal.
Why it matters
Knowing how dendrites compute inside single neurons could reveal what goes wrong at the subcellular level in neurological diseases. The grant names Alzheimer's disease and other neurophysiological disorders as conditions where this understanding could help explain how neural circuits are disrupted.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bradley D Winters
Northeast Ohio Medical University, OH·Neuroscience
Compare inhibitory and excitatory principal neurons of the lateral superior olive (LSO), a brainstem sound-location center, in mice. The work uses PatchSeq gene profiling, patch-clamp and in vivo recordings, and computational models, and tests how conductive hearing loss changes them.
Nace Golding
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Test whether dendritic asymmetry, lopsided input branches, sets the spatial preferences of medial superior olive neurons, using long-term manipulation of interaural time differences in living gerbils.
Radha Kalluri
University of Southern California, CA·Neuroscience
Test whether the mix of ion channels in vestibular ganglion neurons explains their regular versus irregular firing, using patch-clamp recordings combined with single-cell labeling of dendrite shape in semi-intact inner-ear tissue.
The school
University of California-Santa Barbara: 17 labs on PI Pages, $303M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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