I'm here in sunny La Jolla at the University of California, San Diego. For the next three weeks I'll try to visualize neural activity in parts of the Aplysia brain called the buccal ganglia. The work will build on my previous trip to the Kristan lab, where we got the so-called Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) to work in principle. Last time around, we used micro-electrodes to manipulate the voltage of a neuron (nerve cell) in the buccal ganglia stained with FRET dyes. We managed to see the voltage changes in the microscope because of the changes in fluorescence from the voltage-sensitive FRET dyes. This time it will be a little more tricky! We will try to monitor the entire ganglia (not just one neuron) during spontaneous neural activity (not artificial voltage changes). If it works, we will be able to watch the sequence of activity in hundreds of single neurons during the generation of spontaneous behavior. It would be a major breakthrough for a number of disciplines in invertebrate neurobiology.
I hope to have the time and the resources to cover our efforts step by step right here!

Tags: aplysia, FRET, neurobiology, neuroscience