Human Thalamus

In this project we study the synaptic organization of the human thalamus.

Understanding the organization of human thalamus is a major challenge in neuroscience. It is involved in almost all neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases and it is the target of numerous deep brain surgery. Research on human thalamus, however, has its obvious limitations and challenges due to its availability and the scale of investigations (from microns to centimeters).

In this project we identify the organization of afferents in the human thalamus with immunocytochemistry of ultrahigh sensitivity, image the entire thalamus at a resolution which allows the identification of the types and density of individual axon terminals in the entire structure and compare these morpho-functional landscape with the available neurochemical maps. Axon terminal types are characterized at the confocal and electron microscopic levels as well in healthy and diseased states.

We aim to understand the logic of afferent integration and nuclear organization in the human thalamus and compare it to its rodent equivalents.