Achievement

Fellow Megan Anderson is focused on the ability to enhance the number of surviving neurons derived from NSCs in the adult brain with regards to neurodegenerative diseases and brain injury. Her goal is to identify some of the aspects of learning that promote survival of new neurons in the hippocampus. She is looking at the relationship between neurogenesis, learning, acetylcholine, and rhythmic brain activity and has developed methods which leave the cholinergic projections to the hippocampus intact on one side of the brain and not the other, demonstrating that disrupting these projections does not disrupt associative learning. Her data suggests neurogenesis is decreased in the hemisphere without acetylcholine but not in the other hemisphere, and that acetylcholine disruption prevented the enhanced survival only in the lesioned hemisphere. She has just finished recordings of brain rhythms in the hippocampus in both hemispheres to understand how theta rhythms may relate.