Achievement

Biological Sciences student David Whitney and his advisor, Professor Justin Crowley, study plasticity in the ferret visual cortex using optical imaging. Working with Dr. Fred Wolf in the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Whitney investigated a novel manipulation that uses blue light to stimulate cortical tissue that has been transfected using a viral vector containing Channelrhodopsin-2. When the light is paired with a visual stimulus containing edges at a specific orientation, neurons alter their responses. Whitney's results show that this neural plasticity effect is not uniform across the visual cortex as might be expected. Instead, the response differed as a function of distance from so-called 'pinwheel regions" where cells with all different orientation tunings meet., and as a function of the region's pre-existing bias in orientation preference. These results show that optical stimuation is an effective tool for probing cortical plasticity mechanisms.