One of the foremost challenges in neuroscience is to establish a causal relationship between an animal’s genetic make-up and its behavior: while it seems clear that certain normal and pathological behavioral traits have a genetic basis, understanding how genes determine the function of neurons and neural circuits to thereby generate and modulate an animal’s behavior is highly challenging and requires an integrated view of nearly all disciplines in neuroscience. In this course, we will present basic concepts on multiple levels of nervous system organization & function and discuss how they are connected to each other.
The syllabus will include the following topics:
- Evolution of the brain and animal behavior: innate versus adaptive behavior
- Neurogenetics - the hereditary basis of behavioral traits
- Genomic & transcriptional regulation in neurons
- Epigenetics and transgenerational inheritance of behavioral traits
- Cell biology of neurons: cellular diversity
- Neural circuits: assembly, from micro- to meso-scale circuit function
- Experience-dependent plasticity: Different forms of cellular and circuit plasticity, learning & memory
- C.elegans as a model system for molecular and systems neuroscience
- From genes to sexual behavior