Grimm Group

Integrated Photonic and Genetic Tools for Optical Neurophysiology

Understanding the principles that connect mammalian behaviour with its underlying neuronal dynamics in real time remains a fundamental challenge of neuroscience. How does the mammalian brain compute during for example sensory perception or behaviour? Can we unravel the logic and syntax of neuronal computation? And once we do: How does computation change across time; during learning and memory formation, development and aging, or through disease progression? To address these questions, neuroscience requires methods capable of interrogating and manipulating neuronal activity at a large scale but with single-cell and single-spike precision. Working towards these goals, our lab aims to develop fully optical approaches to probe and manipulate neuronal activity in the mammalian brain.

In our lab, we will integrate advanced genetic and photonic tools to establish fully optical physiology approaches for the non-invasive activity manipulation and interrogation of excitable cells in the mammalian brain. We will pursue an interdisciplinary route by combining protein engineering and patch-clamp electrophysiology to create tailored genetic probes and integrate them with scanless holographic illumination techniques to perform two-photon optogenetics and two-photon voltage imaging. This will enable us to set up non-invasive optical physiology approaches that offer both high spatiotemporal precision and throughput and allow to study neuronal dynamics across time.

Group members