Speakers
James Poluet
(Neural Circuits and Behaviours lab - Max Belbrück Center, Berlin, Germany)
Date
15
Sep 2021
Time
14:00:00
Address
Building: Amphitheater Duclaux, IP
Location
2021-09-15 14:00:00
2021-09-15 15:00:00
Europe/Paris
Joint Seminar Neuroscience Department – IDA – Cortical circuits of thermal perception
The question of whether warm and cool are represented in the nervous system as anatomically and functionally separate ‘labelled lines’ or rather as a mixed cellular encoding has polarized the debate about thermal coding […]
Brice Bathellier
brice.bathellier@pasteur.fr
About
The question of whether warm and cool are represented in the nervous system as anatomically and functionally separate ‘labelled lines’ or rather as a mixed cellular encoding has polarized the debate about thermal coding since Magnus Blix first identified cool and warm spots on the skin in 1882. Studies of temperature encoding have traditionally focused on primary sensory afferent neurons and their thermal ion channels, in contrast the cortical encoding of non-painful temperature however has remained a mystery as a ‘thermal cortex’ has not been identified. In this talk, I will discuss the remarkable ability of mice to detect temperature changes as well as the cortical representation of non-painful temperature. Intriguingly, despite being positioned along the same one-dimensional sensory axis, the cellular encoding schemes of cool and warm appear not to be mere mirror copies of each other, but more closely resemble functional sub-modalities within the thermal system.