Dr. Alison Barth is the recipient of a $1.125 M award from the National Institutes of Health for her project, “Experience-Dependent Plasticity in a fosGFP Transgenic Mouse”

The NIH have awarded Alison Barth, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, $1.125 M to study how neuronal activity translates into perception, behavior, and learning. To identify neurons that have been activated during particular brain functions, Dr. Barth’s laboratory has developed a transgenic mouse expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) under the control of the c-fos promoter. In the NIH-funded project, they will characterize and validate the fosGFP transgene expression patterns. They will also use the fosGFP mouse to identify and characterize changes in cellular anatomy and dynamic membrane properties that occur in activated neural subsets after undergoing experience-dependent plasticity. At left, a fluorescence photomicrograph of a mouse brain cross-section represents localized upregulation of fosGFP expression in a specific region after stimulation of a single facial whisker that leads specifically to that region.