Biology subjects

Laurenczy, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Laurenczy, B..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

The Bgee suite: integrated curated expression atlas and comparative transcriptomics in animals

Bgee is a database to retrieve and compare gene expression patterns in multiple animal species, produced by integrating multiple data types (RNA-Seq, Affymetrix, in situ hybridization, and EST data). It is based exclusively on curated healthy wild-type expression data (e.g., no gene knock-out, no treatment, no disease), to provide a comparable reference of normal gene expression. Curation includes very large datasets such as GTEx (re-annotation of samples as "healthy" or not) as well as many small ones. Data are integrated and made comparable between species thanks to consistent data annotation and processing, and to calls of presence/absence of expression, along with expression scores. As a result, Bgee is capable of detecting the conditions of expression of any single gene, accommodating any data type and species. Bgee provides several tools for analyses, allowing, e.g., automated comparisons of gene expression patterns within and between species, retrieval of the prefered conditions of expression of any gene, or enrichment analyses of conditions with expression of sets of genes. Bgee release 14.1 includes 29 animal species, and is available at https://bgee.org/ and through its Bioconductor R package BgeeDB.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Sensory and Behavioral Components of Neocortical Signal Flow in Discrimination Tasks with Short-term Memory

In neocortex, each sensory modality engages distinct primary and secondary areas that route information further to association areas. Where signal flow may converge for maintaining information in short-term memory and how behavior may influence signal routing remain open questions. Using wide-field calcium imaging, we compared cortex-wide neuronal activity in layer 2/3 for mice trained in auditory and whisker-based tactile discrimination tasks with delayed response. In both tasks, mice were either active or passive during stimulus presentation, engaging in body movements or sitting quietly. Irrespective of behavioral strategy, auditory and tactile stimulation activated spatially segregated subdivisions of posterior parietal cortex (areas A and RL, respectively). In the subsequent delay period, in contrast, behavioral strategy rather than sensory modality determined where short-term memory was located: frontomedially in active trials and posterolaterally in passive trials. Our results suggest behavior-dependent routing of sensory-driven cortical information flow from modality-specific PPC subdivisions to higher association areas.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Context-dependent limb movement encoding in neuronal populations of motor cortex

Neuronal networks of the mammalian motor cortex (M1) are important for dexterous control of limb joints. Yet it remains unclear how encoding of joint movement in M1 networks depends on varying environmental contexts. Using calcium imaging we measured neuronal activity in layer 2/3 of the mouse M1 forelimb region while mice grasped either regularly or irregularly spaced ladder rungs during locomotion. We found that population coding of forelimb joint movements is sparse and varies according to the flexibility demanded from them in the regular and irregular context, even for equivalent grasping actions across conditions. This context-dependence of M1 network encoding emerged during learning of the locomotion task, fostered more precise grasping actions, but broke apart upon silencing of projections from secondary motor cortex (M2). These findings suggest that M2 reconfigures M1 neuronal circuits to adapt joint processing to the flexibility demands in specific familiar contexts, thereby increasing the accuracy of motor output.

neuroscience↗