The First Love
The mystery of the dentate gyrus will always be with the Ewell Lab.
I’m (Laura Ewell) going to break with the rest of the website here and speak in the first person. I’ve been studying the dentate gyrus for ~ 15 years - and it still feels elusive. One aspect of these studies I’ve especially loved is the way they’ve challenged me to think about neural coding in general. This figure comes from a paper in which Antoine Madar, Matt Jones, and I define ‘temporal’ pattern separation - individual neurons in the DG transform incoming spike trains into outputs that are less similar. This work is worth a read just for the discussion about spiketrain metrics - you may also get hooked on the DG!
Most of the in vitro work going on in our lab is focused on the DG. Among other things - we are interested in granule cell heterogeneity in health and in epilepsy. Here are examples of cells that we’ve recorded from and filled with biocytin. We’ve been exploring various electrophysiological properties that will help us understand when these neurons would be active - and whether different sub-groups are present. We have animal lines that express CRE in granule cells - and we have parallel experiments running in which we record from and manipulate the DG. We’re aiming to bring these two lines of research together.