News

We are extremely happy to learn that a 3rd funding period for the CRC1233 “Robust Vision” projects have been granted. We are excited to start a new project on context-adapted visual codes in a collaboration with Philipp Berens, Katrin Franke and Fabian Sinz. And we are very pleased that we can continue our research towards advanced naturalistic stimuli for mice with Thomas Euler and Katrin Franke. We are grateful for the reviewers’ positive evaluation and we thank the DFG for funding these projects!

Together with Steffen Katzner, Tobias Rose, and Tatjana Tchumatchenko, we submitted a review to Annual Reviews of Vision Science on “The Role of Layer 6 Corticothalamic Circuits in Vision: Plasticity, Sensory Processing, and Behavior”. We are looking forward to the reviewers’ comments.

Huge congrats to Ann Kotkat and Verena Peterreins for being accepted into the CSHL Summer School Computational Neuroscience: Vision and the Cajal Computational Neuroscience Course, respectively. We’ll be travelling, studying, and networking a lot this summer!

A warm welcome to Maja Duschek and Constantin Sorge, who will work on their BSc thesis in our lab. Maja will trace inputs and output of LP under the supervision of Anton Sumser, and Constantin will study the response properties of visTRN neurons under the supervision of Verena Peterreins, Steffen Katzner and myself.

Very happy to see Davide Crombie’s PhD work on coupling of dLGN tonic and burst spiking to multiple timescales in the pupil signal accepted in PLoS Biology.

Very proud of our new preprint in which we model the impact of retinal and non-retinal inputs on dLGN activity. We find that a subpopulation of poorly visually responsive neurons profits most from accounting of non-retinal inputs in our model. In addition, our model uncovered that CT feedback is most effective in the absence of a patterned visual stimulus, Finally, stimulus information can be better decoded during suppression of CT feedback. We discuss how these findings can be embedded into current views on the role of CT feedback in stimulus processing.

We are very happy to welcome Nancy Mulaiese as a new doctoral researcher to the team. Nancy is joining through the IMPRS-BI program and will work on an exciting project regarding the impact of cortico-thalamic feedback on information processing in visual cortex. We will perform detailed circuit manipulations and recordings from dLGN and V1. We will also collaborate with Tatjana Tchumatchenko on extending V1 network models with the thalamo-cortico-thalamic loop.

We are very excited to see this new review in collaboration with Aman Saleem published (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-023-00716-7). It discusses current knowledge on interactions between the spatial and the visual system of the brain, and we hope that it will be a useful summary for the field.

Very proud of this new publication from the lab, driven forward on the LMU side by previous doctoral researcher Simon Renner. Within the SPP2041 Computational Connectomics and in a tight experiment-theory collaboration with Tatjana Tchumatchenko‘s lab, we worked on inferring connectivity of V1 and the thalamic inputs exploiting the stabilized supralinear network.

Kraynyukova, N.*, Renner, S.*, Born, G., Bauer, Y., Spacek, M.A., Tushev, G., Busse, L.**, Tchumatchenko, T.** (2022). In vivo extracellular recordings of thalamic and cortical visual responses reveal V1 connectivity rules. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 119, e2207032119. [*shared first authors, **shared last authors]

A warm welcome to Verena Peterreins who returns to the lab after a successful MSc thesis in Human Biology as a GSN doctoral researcher! Verena will use the next few months to dive deep into our project on “Natural stimuli for mice”. Welcome to the team!