Andrew Nguyen, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Ph.D. Program, UC San Diego

Advisor: Professor Padmini Rangamani, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Synaptic plasticity is important for learning and memory. With increasing evidence linking sleep states to changes in synaptic strength, an emerging view is that sleep promotes learning and memory, by facilitating experience-induced synaptic plasticity. Adenosine, a neuromodulator often associated with the regulation of sleep, and its receptors (A1R and A2AR) have been found to be responsible for the potentiation or inhibition of synaptic transmission in the context of calcium signaling in neurons. In my work, I hypothesize that the interactions between adenosine and various calcium-mediated signaling pathways, such as glutamate-mediated calcium signaling, will give rise to the modulation of synaptic plasticity in neurons. To investigate this hypothesis I have been developing a quantitative model of signaling crosstalk between adenosine receptors and Glutamate receptors (mGluR5) to capture the connection between the molecular machinery associated with circadian adenosine to the molecular machinery associated with synaptic plasticity.

The video of this presentation is available here.