Welcome to the Department of Neurophysiology
In this department, excellent achievements in the education and research of neurophysiology and brain science have been accumulated by successive professors and researchers.
Since 2014 when our laboratory started, we have been doing research for elucidating neural mechanisms of gaze holding using electrophysiological, morphological, and molecular techniques.
Holding the eye steady after movement is essential for stably capturing a visual target by the foveal centralis of the retina.
The function of gaze holding is executed primarily by an oculomotor “neural integrator” that converts transient burst signals that are proportional to eye or head velocity into sustained signals that are proportional to eye position.
Horizontal and vertical gaze holdings are separately controlled by different oculomotor neural integrators, the prepositus hypoglossi nucleus (PHN) and the interstitial nucleus of Cajal (INC), respectively.
Although the generation of sustained signals necessary for gaze holding is attributed to neural network mechanisms, such as positive feedback excitation through mutual inhibition and/or recurrent excitation, there are few experimental studies on the synaptic mechanisms employed to produce sustained signals in the mammalian neural integrator.
The goal of our study is the elucidation of neural mechanisms of neural integrators participating in gaze holding.
(Related papers)
Saito Y, Sugimura T (2019) Different activation mechanisms of excitatory networks in the rat oculomotor integrators for vertical and horizontal gaze holding.
eNeuro 7 January/February 2020.
doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0364-19.2019
Saito Y, Sugimura T, Yanagawa Y (2017) Comparisons of neuronal and excitatory network properties between the rat brainstem nuclei that participate in vertical and horizontal gaze holding.
eNeuro 4 September/October 2017.
doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0180-17.2017.
Saito Y, Yanagawa Y (2010) Synaptic mechanism for the sustained activation of oculomotor integrator circuits in the rat prepositus hypoglossi nucleus: Contribution of Ca2+-permeable AMPA receptors.
Journal of Neuroscience 30: 15735-15746.
doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2814-10.2010