Guided by the notion that biology itself offers some of the most incisive tools for studying biological systems, we rely on basic cellular mechanisms and materials encoded in DNA to record and remote-control the activity of nerve cells in the living brain. Our interests lie at the interface between cellular and systems neuroscience: we aim to understand how excitable cells are arranged into functional circuits, and how the operation of these circuits informs behaviour.

To illuminate circuit mechanisms, we study explants of mouse brains in which specific classes of neurons have been programmed genetically to be light-addressable. This allows us to feed synthetic ‘test patterns’ into the circuitry and trace the transformations of these patterns in optical or electrophysiological recordings, with the intent of revealing the underlying information-processing architectures and computational principles.

To relate circuit states to behaviour, we work with another genetically tractable organism, the fruit fly. We observe or induce changes in the physiological states of genetically defined groups of neurons in the intact brain and correlate them with behavioural states to decipher the neural signals used to represent ‘content’.

Gero Miesenböck