Next week, on Friday February 2nd, DMCBH Neuroscience Colloquium is hosting Dr. Hanchaun Peng from the Allen Brain Institute to talk about large-scale brain imaging and connectivity datasets. In next week’s journal club will on (Thursday, February 1) we’ll meet in the Kingsmill Forum (4th floor in The Nest, UBC) at 5:30 PM, to discuss large-scale brain imaging and the connectome. 

To get familiar with the topic of Dr. Peng’s talk and the work of the Allen Brain Institute, we’ll be covering this paper from the Allen Brain Institute team in our journal club: Oh, S.,… Zeng, H. (2014). A mesoscale connectome of the mouse brain. Nature, 508(7495), 207–214.

The journal club is open to all students (undergraduates and graduates). Please read the article and join us for a discussion on how and whether a connectome is useful in understanding neural circuit function. For an interesting  background read on this much-debated issue, you can take a look at whether the C.Elegens connectome has been useful in explaining this worm’s behaviour (article from the Scientific American) 

The Allen Brain Institute is actively working on large-scale characterization and mapping of the mouse brain and they’ve created many helpful visualization of the mouse brain atlas  – we’ll also touch on these in the journal club, in case they might be helpful in your research projects.