ELSC Seminar Series

It is intuitive, and widely accepted, to consider unperturbed blood supply to the brain as mandatory for its proper function. As such, blood flow  increases around active areas of the brain in a process known as neurovascular coupling. I would like to refer to this as the “forward” direction of neurovascular coupling. I will share our efforts to decode, at the cellular level, the neurovascular transfer function from data we collected through volumetric two-phon microscopy. On the flip side, extreme perturbations to blood flow, such as ischemic events, are know to affect brain structure and function. Whether more subtle changes in blood flow can affect neuronal activity is still largely unknown. We explore a range of such perturbations, from week-long changes to the fast pulsatile changes associated with each single heartbeats; this in an effort to identify the “backward” direction of neurovascular coupling to form a conceptually closed regulatory loop.