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Research Goals
Project Status
Publications

Anand Chandrasekaran
Development: Axon guidance

Personal Background

As an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, I was fortunate in attending a workshop on computational neuroscience at the National Center for Biological Sciences - Bangalore. I decided to continue my career in neuroscience by pursing a Ph.D at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. I completed my dissertation on the "Physiological consequences of disrupted topographic instructive signals on the retinocollicular map", working for Dr. Michael C. Crair. I hope to extend the knowledge gained studying sensory map formation to building chips that have dynamic, self-organizing wiring patterns.
 

Research Goals

The sensory world is organized into regular neuronal arrays or maps. The most common example being maps of visual space in regions such as the visual cortex and the superior colliculus. In these maps, neighboring cells respond to similar features of sensory stimuli, and there is an orderly progression of these features across the array of neurons. While genes provide an instructive signal that sets up the gross topographic connectivity between brain regions (For review see McLaughlin 2005), activity-dependent instructive signals, provided by either the environment, or by patterned spontaneous activity early in development, control specificity or refinement (Chandrasekaran 2005, 2007, 2009). Through this activity-dependent process, afferent projections come to accurately reflect patterns of sensory input.

One major aspect of this refinement or learning process involves the organization of axon arbors. The dynamics of synapse formation and stabilization have been strongly linked with the growth, branching and pruning of axons (Meyer 2006, Ruthazer 2006), possibly a function of target derived neurotrophic factors (Marshak 2007, Hu 2005). This leaves us with a novel synapse-based axon-routing scheme that I intend to implement in silicon.

Project Status

Key components of the Axon Router Chip are ready and the chip is being assembled for fabrication (as of Feb 2009).

Publications

ID Article Full Text
A3
Chandrasekaran AR, Furuta Y, Crair MC, Consequences of axon guidance defects on the development of retinotopic receptive fields in the mouse colliculus , J Physioli. 2009 Mar 1; 587; 953–963
 Full Text
A2
Chandrasekaran AR, Shah RD, Crair MC, Developmental homeostasis of mouse retinocollicular synapses, J Neurosci. 2007 Feb 14;27(7):1746-55.

Full Text

A1
Chandrasekaran AR, Plas DT, Gonzalez E, Crair MC, Evidence for an instructive role of retinal activity in retinotopic map refinement in the superior colliculus of the mouse, J Neurosci. 2005 Jul 20;25(29):6929-38.
 Full Text

References

McLaughlin T, O'Leary DD, Molecular gradients and development of retinotopic maps, Annu Rev Neurosci. 2005;28:327-55.

Meyer MP, Smith SJ, Evidence from in vivo imaging that synaptogenesis guides the growth and branching of axonal arbors by two distinct mechanisms, J Neurosci. 2006 Mar 29;26(13):3604-14.

Ruthazer ES, Li J, Cline HT, Stabilization of axon branch dynamics by synaptic maturation, J Neurosci. 2006 Mar 29;26(13):3594-603.

Hu B, Nikolakopoulou AM, Cohen-Cory S, BDNF stabilizes synapses and maintains the structural complexity of optic axons in vivo, Development. 2005 Oct;132(19):4285-98.

Marshak S, Nikolakopoulou AM, Dirks R, Martens GJ, Cohen-Cory S, Cell-autonomous TrkB signaling in presynaptic retinal ganglion cells mediates axon arbor growth and synapse maturation during the establishment of retinotectal synaptic connectivity, J Neurosci. 2007 Mar 7;27(10):2444-56.

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