BI 002 Steven Potter Part 2: Brains in Dishes

Find out more about Steve at his website.

Things mentioned during the show:

• Papers we talked about:
  • Publishing negative results!
    • Wagenaar, D. A., Pine, J., & Potter, S. M. (2006). Searching for plasticity in dissociated cortical cultures on multi-electrode arrays. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 5:16. Download
  • Solving the bursting neurons problem:
    • Wagenaar, D. A. Madhavan, R. Pine, J. and Potter, S. M. (2005) Controlling bursting in cortical cultures with closed-loop multi-electrode stimulation. J. Neuroscience 25: 680-68 Download
  • Training the cultured networks:
    • Chao, Z. C., Bakkum, D. J., & Potter, S. M. (2008). Shaping Embodied Neural Networks for Adaptive Goal-directed Behavior. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(3): e1000042. Online Open-Access paper, supplement, and movie.
    • Bakkum, D. J., Chao, Z. C. (Co-First Authors), & Potter, S. M. (2008). Spatio-temporal electrical stimuli shape behavior of an embodied cortical network in a goal-directed learning task. Journal of Neural Engineering, 5, 310-323. Download reprint (3MB PDF)
  • The richness of the bursting activity, and how to get good signals from neurons in dishes:
    • Wagenaar, D. A., Pine, J. and Potter, S. M. (2006). An extremely rich repertoire of bursting patterns during the development of cortical cultures. BMC Neuroscience 7:11.Reprint (2.79 MB PDF).
    • You can find tons (over 40GB) of data from that paper here.
• Non-synaptic plasticity (what?!)
  • Bakkum, D. J., Chao, Z. C., & Potter, S. M. (2008). Long-term activity-dependent plasticity of action potential propagation delay and amplitude in cortical networks. PLoS One, 3(5), e2088. Online Open-Access paper.
• DIY neuroscience: Backyard brains
• Citizen neuroscience:
  • Elizabeth Rickers‘ citizen science efforts at Neuroeducate
  • Sapiens Labs
  • Steve’s lab provides open-source electrophysiology rig plans, called NeuroRighter.
• Follow Steve’s Instrucable projects.
  • Go make Steve’s window light!
  • Or watch a time-lapse of him building an awesome work-bench
  • Here’s are detailed posters of his SunRisa sun-like alarm clock.

Extra fun stuff

• The world-record setting skinny-dippers.
• Pop-locking dancing robots!