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Name: Amy Gamelli Kuo
Title: Pre-Doctoral Candidate Degree: B.S. Biopsychology and French Research area: In Vitro Electrophysiology, Learning, Memory and Cognition, Behavior Program: Neuroscience Address: Department of Physiology Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine 303 East Chicago Ave. Chicago, IL 60611 Phone: (312) 503-1547 Fax: (312) 503-7912 Email:a-gamelli@northwestern.edu |
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Amy Gamelli Kuo |
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Detailed research description: I chose to pursue my thesis work in Dr. Disterhoft’s laboratory given my interests in understanding the neurobiological basis of learning and memory. I am very interested in understanding the changes that occur in the brain during learning and how these changes are effected by age, thus leading to memory loss, and in severe cases, diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Previous studies done by our lab have shown the importance of the hippocampus for acquisition of the trace eyeblink conditioning task in rabbits, and more recently, in rats. In addition, using sharp-electrode current clamp recording techniques, it was shown that in rabbits the post-burst afterhyperpolarization (AHP) and spike frequency adaptation of CA1 pyramidal neurons were reduced in animals that had learned the trace eyeblink task. These changes were learning specific as they did not occur in animals that were trained but did not learn the task or in pseudoconditioned animals. One of the key questions for the lab that I have chosen to focus my work on is “do these changes occur after learning another hippocampally-dependent task?” However, few additional hippocampally-dependent tasks have been adapted for use in the rabbit. The rat, on the other hand, has many hippocampally-dependent tasks which have been developed for use in this species. I am currently training rats on the trace eyeblink conditioning task in order to determine if similar changes in neuronal excitability occur in the rat as in the rabbit after acquisition of this task. Using the sharp-electrode current clamp technique, I am planning to investigate what types changes occur in rat CA1 neurons following acquisition of another hippocampally-dependent task, the Morris water maze. Subsequent to these studies, I will be looking at the effect of simultaneous training on both the trace eyeblink conditioning and Morris water maze tasks on CA1 neurons. In addition, I plan to determine which region of the hippocampus is involved in acquisition of the trace eyeblink task. A number of studies have shown that the dorsal, but not the ventral hippocampus is involved in acquisition of the Morris maze. To date, no one has examined which region is necessary for learning tasks requiring the association of temporally remote events. Together, this set of experiments will give us a better idea of how the hippocampus encodes information on both a regional, as well as cellular, level. For my curriculum vitae please click here
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