Busse & Katzner Lab
Viewing the world through the lens of oscillations
Congratulations to Lukas Meyerolbersleben for a fantastic publication co-supervised with Anton Sirota in Neuron (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2025.03.030) and many thanks to Chockalingam Ramanathan and Julia Veit for writing a comprehensive preview of the work entitled Lights, contrast, action! Disentangling visually induced oscillations (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2025.06.008)
Celebrating our new publication in iScience, in collaboration with Philipp Berens in Tübingen:
Schmors, L., Kotkat, A.H., Bauer, Y., Huang, Z., Crombie, D., Meyerolbersleben, L.S., Sokoloski, S., Berens, P., Busse, L., 2025. Effects of corticothalamic feedback depend on visual responsiveness and stimulus type. iScience 28, 112481.
Congratulations to all authors!
Welcome to this semester’s BSc students Stella Vielhaber and Nick Saiz who will do their thesis work in our lab. In their projects, we will explore the behavioral impact of L6 CT neuron suppression on visual discrimination learning.
Congratulations to Lukas Meyerolbersleben, whose manuscript got accepted for publication in Neuron. We apply a framework developed by Anton Sirota and colleagues to data from the Allen Institute Visual Coding Dataset, and show that anatomically resolved oscillatory bursts reveal dynamic motifs of thalamocortical activity during naturalistic stimulus viewing.
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.