Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education : JUNE : a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 2017
As part of a series of workshops on teaching neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience annual ... more As part of a series of workshops on teaching neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience annual meetings, William Grisham and Richard Olivo organized the 2016 workshop on "Teaching Neuroscience with Big Data." This article presents a summary of that workshop. Speakers provided overviews of open datasets that could be used in teaching undergraduate courses. These included resources that already appear in educational settings, including the Allen Brain Atlas (presented by Joshua Brumberg and Terri Gilbert), and the Mouse Brain Library and GeneNetwork (presented by Robert Williams). Other resources, such as NeuroData (presented by William R. Gray Roncal), and OpenFMRI, NeuroVault, and Neurosynth (presented by Russell Poldrack) have not been broadly utilized by the neuroscience education community but offer obvious potential. Finally, William Grisham discussed the iNeuro Project, an NSF-sponsored effort to develop the necessary curriculum for preparing students to handle Big ...
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Jun 15, 2007
The principles of neurophysiology continue to be challenging topics to teach in the context of un... more The principles of neurophysiology continue to be challenging topics to teach in the context of undergraduate neuroscience education. Laboratory classes containing neurophysiological demonstrations and exercises are, therefore, an important and necessary complement for covering those subjects taught in lecture-based courses. We developed a number of simple yet very instructive exercises, described below, which make use of extracellular recordings from different sensory systems of the cockroach (Periplanta americana). The compendium we developed provides students with hands-on demonstrations of several commonly taught topics of neurophysiology including sensory coding by neural activity.
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 2008
One challenge of neuroscience educators is to make accessible to students as many aspects of brai... more One challenge of neuroscience educators is to make accessible to students as many aspects of brain structure and function as possible. The anatomy and function of the cerebrovasculature is among many topics of neuroscience that are underrepresented in undergraduate neuroscience education. Recognizing this deficit, we evaluated methods to produce archival tissue specimens of the cerebrovasculature and the "neurovascular unit" for instruction and demonstration in the teaching lab. An additional goal of this project was to identify the costs of each method as well as to determine which method(s) could be adapted into lab exercises, where students participate in the tissue preparation, staining, etc. In the present report, we detail several methods for demonstrating the cerebrovasculature and suggest that including this material can be a valuable addition to more traditional anatomy/physiology demonstrations and exercises.
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 2011
Despite an apparent increase in undergraduate neuroscience programs offered by colleges and unive... more Despite an apparent increase in undergraduate neuroscience programs offered by colleges and universities, there has been little effort to document this growth. In the present report we describe our analysis of the expansion of undergraduate neuroscience programs of study over more than 20 years and detail a number of institutional characteristics of colleges and universities that offer undergraduate neuroscience programs. These data reveal more than 100 institutions with undergraduate neuroscience programs as well as over 2000 college graduates that majored in neuroscience in 2008–2009. Understanding the current number as well as growth trends of undergraduate neuroscience programs found in U.S. colleges and universities has implications for neuroscience educators as well as for the funding of neuroscience research and educational activities.
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 2007
Neuroanatomy can be a challenging topic for undergraduates, making the development of new methods... more Neuroanatomy can be a challenging topic for undergraduates, making the development of new methods of instruction an important goal of neuroscience educators. In the present report we describe the utility and versatility of the Allen Brain Atlas as a novel tool for instruction of several important anatomical principles of the mammalian central nervous system. Using this digital database, we detail how instructors of laboratory or lecture-based courses can demonstrate cytoarchitecture, cellular diversity, and gene expression profiles of the brain.
Laboratory instruction of neuroscience is often limited by the lack of physical resources and sup... more Laboratory instruction of neuroscience is often limited by the lack of physical resources and supplies (e.g., brains specimens, dissection kits, physiological equipment). Online databases can serve as supplements to material labs by providing professionally collected images of brain specimens and their underlying cellular populations with resolution and quality that is extremely difficult to access for strictly pedagogical purposes. We describe a method using two online databases, the Neuromorpho.org and the Allen Brain Atlas (ABA), that freely provide access to data from working brain scientists that can be modified for laboratory instruction/exercises. Neuromorpho.org is the first neuronal morphology database that provides qualitative and quantitative data from reconstructed cells analyzed in published scientific reports. The Neuromorpho.org database contains cross species and multiple neuronal phenotype datasets which allows for comparative examinations. The ABA provides modules ...
The neocortex is the most common target of sub-dural electrotherapy and non-invasive brain stimul... more The neocortex is the most common target of sub-dural electrotherapy and non-invasive brain stimulation modalities including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current simulation (tDCS). Specific neuronal elements targeted by cortical stimulation are considered to underlie therapeutic effects, but the exact cell-type(s) affected by these methods remains poorly understood. We determined if neuronal morphology predicted responses to subthreshold uniform
It has been suggested that tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), a serine protease, plays a ke... more It has been suggested that tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), a serine protease, plays a key role in regulating the extracellular matrix core proteins, thereby impacting the structural plasticity in the cerebral cortex. Much is known about its role in regulating plasticity in the visual cortex. However, its permissive role has not been demonstrated to generalize to other cerebral cortical areas. By utilizing a combination of immunofluorescent histochemistry and confocal microscopy, we demonstrate that endogenous tPA is indeed present in the somatosensory cortex, and its expression is experience-dependent. Chronic sensory deprivation induced by whisker trimming from birth for one month leads to increased tPA immunoreactivity in all layers of the barrel cortex. Furthermore, tPA immunoreactivity remains high even after sensation has been restored to the mystacial pad (by allowing whiskers to grow back to full length for one month). Our results suggest that tPA levels in the cereb...
The 27th annual Barrels meeting highlighted the latest advances in this rapidly growing field. Th... more The 27th annual Barrels meeting highlighted the latest advances in this rapidly growing field. The Barrels meeting annually focuses on the role of the posterior medial thalamus in somatosensation, dendritic processing, and the cortical dynamics involved during touch perception. Speakers utilized diverse molecular, physiological, computational techniques to understand the development, sensory processing, and motor commands that are involved with the rodent mystacial vibrissae. The meeting was held Thursday, 13 November through Friday, 14 November 2014 on the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
Journal of undergraduate neuroscience education : JUNE : a publication of FUN, Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 2017
As part of a series of workshops on teaching neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience annual ... more As part of a series of workshops on teaching neuroscience at the Society for Neuroscience annual meetings, William Grisham and Richard Olivo organized the 2016 workshop on "Teaching Neuroscience with Big Data." This article presents a summary of that workshop. Speakers provided overviews of open datasets that could be used in teaching undergraduate courses. These included resources that already appear in educational settings, including the Allen Brain Atlas (presented by Joshua Brumberg and Terri Gilbert), and the Mouse Brain Library and GeneNetwork (presented by Robert Williams). Other resources, such as NeuroData (presented by William R. Gray Roncal), and OpenFMRI, NeuroVault, and Neurosynth (presented by Russell Poldrack) have not been broadly utilized by the neuroscience education community but offer obvious potential. Finally, William Grisham discussed the iNeuro Project, an NSF-sponsored effort to develop the necessary curriculum for preparing students to handle Big ...
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Jun 15, 2007
The principles of neurophysiology continue to be challenging topics to teach in the context of un... more The principles of neurophysiology continue to be challenging topics to teach in the context of undergraduate neuroscience education. Laboratory classes containing neurophysiological demonstrations and exercises are, therefore, an important and necessary complement for covering those subjects taught in lecture-based courses. We developed a number of simple yet very instructive exercises, described below, which make use of extracellular recordings from different sensory systems of the cockroach (Periplanta americana). The compendium we developed provides students with hands-on demonstrations of several commonly taught topics of neurophysiology including sensory coding by neural activity.
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 2008
One challenge of neuroscience educators is to make accessible to students as many aspects of brai... more One challenge of neuroscience educators is to make accessible to students as many aspects of brain structure and function as possible. The anatomy and function of the cerebrovasculature is among many topics of neuroscience that are underrepresented in undergraduate neuroscience education. Recognizing this deficit, we evaluated methods to produce archival tissue specimens of the cerebrovasculature and the "neurovascular unit" for instruction and demonstration in the teaching lab. An additional goal of this project was to identify the costs of each method as well as to determine which method(s) could be adapted into lab exercises, where students participate in the tissue preparation, staining, etc. In the present report, we detail several methods for demonstrating the cerebrovasculature and suggest that including this material can be a valuable addition to more traditional anatomy/physiology demonstrations and exercises.
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 2011
Despite an apparent increase in undergraduate neuroscience programs offered by colleges and unive... more Despite an apparent increase in undergraduate neuroscience programs offered by colleges and universities, there has been little effort to document this growth. In the present report we describe our analysis of the expansion of undergraduate neuroscience programs of study over more than 20 years and detail a number of institutional characteristics of colleges and universities that offer undergraduate neuroscience programs. These data reveal more than 100 institutions with undergraduate neuroscience programs as well as over 2000 college graduates that majored in neuroscience in 2008–2009. Understanding the current number as well as growth trends of undergraduate neuroscience programs found in U.S. colleges and universities has implications for neuroscience educators as well as for the funding of neuroscience research and educational activities.
Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, 2007
Neuroanatomy can be a challenging topic for undergraduates, making the development of new methods... more Neuroanatomy can be a challenging topic for undergraduates, making the development of new methods of instruction an important goal of neuroscience educators. In the present report we describe the utility and versatility of the Allen Brain Atlas as a novel tool for instruction of several important anatomical principles of the mammalian central nervous system. Using this digital database, we detail how instructors of laboratory or lecture-based courses can demonstrate cytoarchitecture, cellular diversity, and gene expression profiles of the brain.
Laboratory instruction of neuroscience is often limited by the lack of physical resources and sup... more Laboratory instruction of neuroscience is often limited by the lack of physical resources and supplies (e.g., brains specimens, dissection kits, physiological equipment). Online databases can serve as supplements to material labs by providing professionally collected images of brain specimens and their underlying cellular populations with resolution and quality that is extremely difficult to access for strictly pedagogical purposes. We describe a method using two online databases, the Neuromorpho.org and the Allen Brain Atlas (ABA), that freely provide access to data from working brain scientists that can be modified for laboratory instruction/exercises. Neuromorpho.org is the first neuronal morphology database that provides qualitative and quantitative data from reconstructed cells analyzed in published scientific reports. The Neuromorpho.org database contains cross species and multiple neuronal phenotype datasets which allows for comparative examinations. The ABA provides modules ...
The neocortex is the most common target of sub-dural electrotherapy and non-invasive brain stimul... more The neocortex is the most common target of sub-dural electrotherapy and non-invasive brain stimulation modalities including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current simulation (tDCS). Specific neuronal elements targeted by cortical stimulation are considered to underlie therapeutic effects, but the exact cell-type(s) affected by these methods remains poorly understood. We determined if neuronal morphology predicted responses to subthreshold uniform
It has been suggested that tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), a serine protease, plays a ke... more It has been suggested that tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), a serine protease, plays a key role in regulating the extracellular matrix core proteins, thereby impacting the structural plasticity in the cerebral cortex. Much is known about its role in regulating plasticity in the visual cortex. However, its permissive role has not been demonstrated to generalize to other cerebral cortical areas. By utilizing a combination of immunofluorescent histochemistry and confocal microscopy, we demonstrate that endogenous tPA is indeed present in the somatosensory cortex, and its expression is experience-dependent. Chronic sensory deprivation induced by whisker trimming from birth for one month leads to increased tPA immunoreactivity in all layers of the barrel cortex. Furthermore, tPA immunoreactivity remains high even after sensation has been restored to the mystacial pad (by allowing whiskers to grow back to full length for one month). Our results suggest that tPA levels in the cereb...
The 27th annual Barrels meeting highlighted the latest advances in this rapidly growing field. Th... more The 27th annual Barrels meeting highlighted the latest advances in this rapidly growing field. The Barrels meeting annually focuses on the role of the posterior medial thalamus in somatosensation, dendritic processing, and the cortical dynamics involved during touch perception. Speakers utilized diverse molecular, physiological, computational techniques to understand the development, sensory processing, and motor commands that are involved with the rodent mystacial vibrissae. The meeting was held Thursday, 13 November through Friday, 14 November 2014 on the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
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