Published Paper: Current Biology

We are pleased to announce the publication of a recent paper by Dr. James Kolasinski, investigating the mechanistic role of GABA in tuning of activity in the primary sensory cortices.

James has been on a Junior Research Fellowship connected to the Plasticity Group having done his DPhil at FMRIB, co-supervised by Heidi Johansen-Berg and Charlie Stagg.  He has now taken up a Henry Wellcome Fellowship at CUBRIC.

This paper: "A Mechanistic Link from GABA to Cortical Architecture and Perception" is published in the journal Current Biology, and is available online here.  Congratulations to James, and his fellow co-authors: John Logan, Emily Hinson, Dan Manners, Amir Divanbeighi Zand, Tamar Makin, Uzay Emir and Charlie Stagg.

Summary of the paper

In this paper, the authors demonstrate that individual differences in human perceptual acuity can be explained by differences in cortical GABAergic tone, a relationship mediated by differences in the tuning of cortical activity

Highlights:

• GABAergic tone correlates with perceptual acuity in the human somatosensory system
• This relationship is mediated by the tuning of activity in somatosensory cortex
• We explain perceptual acuity via the underlying cellular and metabolic processes

Graphical Abstract