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Tay Netoff, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering E-mail: tnetoff@umn.edu

Research Interests:

The Neural Netoff lab is interested in discovering basic mechanisms of epilepsy. We take a dynamical approach to the disease in that we believe you must understand the dynamics of the neurons and their interactions to understand how seizures, a network phenomenon, are generated. We study seizures in brain slices bathed in toxins. By recording from single neurons using patch-clamp recording techniques we can identify changes in the neuron's dynamics as well as changes in the activity a neuron receives. Using a computer interfaced to the neuron through the amplifier, known as a dynamic clamp, we can also simulate changes in neurons that can occur following a seizure. The dynamic clamp can also be used to introduce virtual synapses between real neurons or with virtual neurons simulated on the computer. Patch clamp and dynamic clamp studies are limited to recording the activity of a few neurons at one time. To study the behavior of networks of neurons during a seizure we are turning to optical imaging techniques.

To image the activity, the brain slice is bathed in a dye that indicates the amount of calcium inside neurons, a good indicator of the neuron's activity. This allows us to monitor the activity of hundreds of neurons simultaneously during a seizure.

Selected Publications:

(For a comprehensive list of recent publications, refer to PubMed, a service provided by the National Library of Medicine.)

Verhagen JV, Wesson DW, Netoff TI, White JA, Wachowiak M. Sniffing controls an adaptive filter of sensory input to the olfactory bulb. Nat Neurosci. 2007 May;10(5):631-9.

Pervouchine DD, Netoff TI, Rotstein HG, White JA, Cunningham MO, Whittington MA, Kopell NJ. Low-dimensional maps encoding dynamics in entorhinal cortex and hippocampus. Neural Comput. 2006 Nov;18(11):2617-50. Erratum in: Neural Comput. 2007 Jan;19(1):302.

Netoff, T.I., Acker, C.D., Bettencourt, J.C., White, J.A.. Beyond two-cell networks: experimental measurement of neuronal responses to multiple synaptic inputs. J Comput Neurosci. 2005 May-Jun;18(3):287-95 (2005).

Netoff, T.I., Banks, M.I., Dorval , A.D., Acker, C.D., Haas, J.S., Kopell, N., White, J.A., Synchronization in Hybrid Neuronal Networks of the Hippocampal Formation. J Neurophysiol. 2005 Mar;93(3):1197-208. Epub 2004 Nov 3 (2005).

Netoff, T.I., Clewley, R., Arno , S., Keck, T., White, J.A.. Epilepsy in Small-World Networks. J Neurosci. Sep 15; 24(37):8075-83 (2004).

Netoff, T.I., Pecora, L.M., Schiff, S.J.. Analyitical coupling detection in the presence of noise and nonlinearity, Phys. Rev. E 69(017201) (2004).

Netoff, T.I., Schiff, S.J.. Decreased Neuronal Synchronization During Experimental Seizures. J Neurosci. Aug 15;22(16):7297-307. (2002).