Institut Pasteur
25 rue du Docteur Rous
Bâtiment Fernbach
Cedex 15
75724 - Paris
France

+33 1 45 68 88 03
+33 1 45 68 83 69
pmlledo@pasteur.fr

Job opportunities

Recently, modern neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding how the brain perceives, discriminates, and recognizes odorant molecules. This growing knowledge took over when the sense of smell was no longer considered only as a matter for poetry or wine industry. Over the last decades, chemical senses captured the attention of scientists who started to investigate the different stages of olfactory pathways. Distinct fields such as genetic, biochemistry, cellular biology, neurophysiology and behavior have contributed to provide a picture of how odor information is processed in the olfactory system as it moves from the periphery to higher areas of the brain.
In our laboratory, the combination of these approaches has been effectively done at both the cellular and the system levels. With the adult mouse olfactory bulb as a model, we are addressing a series of fundamental questions concerning the role(s) that neurogenesis plays in the normal functioning of neuronal circuits: Why does neurogenesis persist in some part of the adult brain but not in other ones? Is it a recapitulation of embryogenesis or rather a unique feature of the adult forebrain? Why is it restricted, apparently, to only two specific regions in normal conditions? How do these regions balance the need for plasticity with the need to maintain already-functional information processing networks? Is neurogenesis in the adult brain a constant, restorative process, or is it flexible, producing different numbers of neurons to certain regions according to an animal´s environmental experience? And are new neurons in the adult brain born to perform a particular task not possible for mature neurons, or are they generated as flexible units to undertake whichever role their target structure is in need of most?  Together our recent descriptions of the properties of bulbar neuronal networks, and emerging principles concerning the function of local interneurons, indicate that the newborn cells play a much more complex role than that of simple gatekeepers inhibiting the olfactory bulb network.

LAGIER, S.*, CARLETON, A.* and Lledo, P.-M.(2004):Interplay between local GABAergic interneurons and relay neurons generates gamma oscillations in the rat olfactory bulb. (* equally contributed)..Journal of Neuroscience (2004), 24:4382-4392