Description
Retinal circuits provide a uniquely accessible window into fundamental principles of neural computation. This lecture will introduce two cornerstone electrophysiological approaches—patch-clamp recording and multielectrode array (MEA) techniques—and illustrate how they can be combined to dissect both retinal microcircuits and broader brain networks. It first outlines practical and conceptual aspects of patch-clamp recordings from identified retinal neurons (horizontal, amacrine, and ganglion cells), including voltage- and current-clamp strategies to measure synaptic inputs, intrinsic excitability, and gap-junction coupling. It then discusses how high-density MEA recordings capture parallel activity across large populations of retinal ganglion cells, enabling the study of network dynamics, synchrony, and population coding in health and disease. Examples include retinal encoding of focused versus defocused images, dopamine- and connexin-dependent modulation of coupling, and circuit remodelling in myopia and neurodegeneration. Finally, the lecture will briefly extend these concepts to non-retinal systems, highlighting how the same electrophysiological toolkit can be applied across the nervous system to link cellular mechanisms with systems-level function.| Period | 30 Mar 2026 |
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| Degree of Recognition | Local |