Sally Temple is a neuroscientist tracing the natural interactions of differentiating neurons, bringing us closer to developing effective methods for treating central nervous system damage. MacArthur Fellowships offer the opportunity for Fellows to accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions. The unusual level of independence afforded to Fellows underscores the spirit of freedom intrinsic to creative endeavors. The extraordinary creativity of MacArthur...

Mark Ellisman discusses "Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to enable multi-scale multi-site Brain Research" at the Minority-Serving Institutions Cyberinfrastructure Institute (MSICI2) Planning and Learning Meeting held at SDSC January 30-31 2006

Symposium on: Brain-related Personalized Medecine Held at Society for Neuroscience, 2007

In the spinal cord, motor neurons (MNs) with similar muscle targets and sensory inputs are grouped together into motor pools. To date, relatively little is known about the molecular mechanisms that control the establishment of pool-specific circuitry. Semaphorins, a large family of secreted and cell surface proteins, are important mediators of developmental processes such as axon guidance and cell migration. Here, we used mRNA in situ hybridization to study the expression patterns of...

Brains are usually described as input/output systems: they transform sensory input into motor output. However, the motor output of brains (behavior) is notoriously variable, even under identical sensory conditions. The question of whether this behavioral variability merely reflects residual deviations due to extrinsic random noise in such otherwise deterministic systems or an intrinsic, adaptive indeterminacy trait is central for the basic understanding of brain function. Instead of random...