About the Project
The skin is the largest organ of the body, yet touch remains the least understood of the traditional five senses. Although classes of sensory receptors are known, surprisingly, we do not know exactly which qualities of tactile experience each individual receptor neuron provides. The reason for this is that it has been extremely difficult to do measure how a receptor neuron responds to sensory signal (“function”) whilst also measuring its morphology/anatomy (“structure”). It is exciting, therefore, that recent methodological progress is making it possible now to do this structure-function analysis.
The general aim of this PhD is to address this question, by building on powerful new methods established in the Petersen and Ahissar labs. We seek a highly-motivated student willing to take on challenging experiments at the cutting-edge of neuroscience. The successful student will have the opportunity for training in electrophysiological recording in the awake, behaving state, intracellular recording and reconstruction of neuronal morphology, as well as computational modelling.
Funding Notes
This is a fully-funded studentship in conjunction with the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel covering fees and stipend for 4 years.
Applicants must be from within the UK/EU and hold, or be about to obtain, at least an upper second class honour degree in a related subject area.
Applications should be submitted online, for more information about the programme, key dates and how to apply see our website https://www.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/study/research/funded-programmes/weizmann-studentships/
References
Campagner D., Evans M., Bale M.R., Erskine A., Petersen R.S. (2016) Prediction of primary somatosensory neuron activity during active tactile exploration Elife 5:e10696 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.10696.
Bale M.R., Campagner D., Erskine A., Petersen R.S. (2015) Microsecond-scale Timing Precision in Rodent Trigeminal Primary Afferents J Neuroscience 35:5935-40.
Wallach, A., K. Bagdasarian, and E. Ahissar (2016) On-going computation of whisking phase by mechanoreceptors. Nature neuroscience 19:487–493.
Tonomura, S., Ebara, S., Bagdasarian, K., Uta, D., Ahissar, E., Meir, I., Lampl, I., Kuroda, D., Furuta, T., Furue, H., and Kumamoto, K. (2015). Structure-function correlations of rat trigeminal primary neurons: Emphasis on club-like endings, a vibrissal mechanoreceptor. The Proceedings of the Japan Academy Ser B (Jpn Acad Ser B Phys Biol Sci), 91:560-576
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