Juan Marcos Alarcon - US grants
Affiliations: | Pathology | SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, United States |
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The funding information displayed below comes from the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools and the NSF Award Database.The grant data on this page is limited to grants awarded in the United States and is thus partial. It can nonetheless be used to understand how funding patterns influence mentorship networks and vice-versa, which has deep implications on how research is done.
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High-probability grants
According to our matching algorithm, Juan Marcos Alarcon is the likely recipient of the following grants.| Years | Recipients | Code | Title / Keywords | Matching score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 — 2014 | Alarcon, Juan Marcos | R03Activity Code Description: To provide research support specifically limited in time and amount for studies in categorical program areas. Small grants provide flexibility for initiating studies which are generally for preliminary short-term projects and are non-renewable. |
Decoding Place Cell Firing-Induced Synaptic Plasticity and Cognitive Mapping @ Suny Downstate Medical Center DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In the rodent hippocampus, synapses between CA3 and CA1 pyramidal cells share two key properties: 1) their synaptic strength is modifiable by NMDA receptor dependent long-term potentiation (LTP) and depression (LTD); 2) the activity of many CA3 and CA1 pyramidal cells is location specific in that such place cells discharge rapidly only when a rodent's head is in an environment-specific region called the firing field. The combination of synaptic plasticity and location-specific firing suggests that important spatial information about the environment may be encoded in the strength of pyramidal cell synapses. For instance, theories of spatial mapping based on spike-timing dependent plasticity rules suggest that directional vectors can be encoded in synapses (Blum and Abbott, 1996; Bush et al., 2010). Another example is the graph theory of spatial mapping, which posits that synapses connecting cell pairs with coincident or overlapping fields should strengthen since the two cells will fire together whereas synapses connecting cell pairs with separated fields should remain weak since the two cells will fire only at different times (Muller et al., 1996). A recent report y Isaac and col. (2009) has provided with exciting evidence that strengthens the link between place cell spiking activity and synaptic function, demonstrating that distance is encoded in the strength of individual synapses. In their studies, Isaac and col. used a dual stimulation method where the spiking activity of one place cell is used to stimulate the presynaptic Shaffer collatera input to a CA1 pyramidal cell in a hippocampal slice. At the same time, the activity of a second, simultaneously recorded place cell is used to evoke discharge of the patch-clamped postsynaptic CA1 cell. In spite of these advances, there still is unclear what precise synaptic encoding give rise to plastic changes in synapses of place cells. We will utilize the Isaac and col. (2009) method to identify 1) what kind of synaptic encoding govern the magnitude of strengthening or weakening of plastic synapses subjected to place cell firing stimulation, and, 2) how this synaptic encoding relates to navigational behavior. The significance of this project is two-fold. On one hand it is an empirical exploration of how plastic synapses are modified by location-specific firing, the most powerful signal generated by primary cells in the hippocampus. On the other hand, it will provide first order tests of theoretical models that pose synaptic plasticity mechanisms underlie cognitive mapping. |
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| 2015 — 2016 | Alarcon, Juan Marcos | R21Activity Code Description: To encourage the development of new research activities in categorical program areas. (Support generally is restricted in level of support and in time.) |
Experience-Dependent Modulation of Synaptic Circuits in the Hippocampus @ Suny Downstate Medical Center ? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding how the brain changes with experience is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Memory systems are supported by multiple circuits that connect the neuronal ensembles that contain bits of information from particular learned experiences. We propose to investigate how synapses within the hippocampus circuit are changed by the persistent storage of a spatial memory. Our goal is to define the organization of memory traces at the level of synaptic circuits as part of a comprehensive research program to understand the processes and mechanisms of cognition, the malfunction of which may underlie cognitive disorders. We characterized the functional changes of hippocampal (CA3) and entorhinal cortical (EC layer III) synaptic inputs to CA1 neurons in mice that learned an active place avoidance task, a spatial learning task that depends on synaptic plasticity and its persistence in the dorsal hippocampus. Importantly, changes in hippocampal synaptic function persisted for at least 1 month after training and were observed only in animals in which the place avoidance memory also persisted. Changes in synaptic function did not occur in animals that were exposed to the behavioral arena (untrained control) or received delivery of unavoidable shocks (yoked control). Thus the changes in synaptic function were a consequence of the learning experience and were associated with the spatial memory itself. Interestingly, our observations indicated that these changes are rather large, probably reflecting an impact of learning experience on synaptic circuits beyond the few synapses that are inferred to store the specific bits of explicit information. This is a novel perspective; it seems that storing memory in a neural circuit involves broad changes in synaptic circuit function that may act as a supporting framework for the expression of the explicit information. We propose to use this robust experimental paradigm to further study how the storing of memories changes synaptic function within the hippocampal circuit. We seek to determine whether the persistent synaptic changes are localized to the subset of neurons that were active during the learning experience (Specific Aim 1) and to determine whether these changes parallel changes in the expression of mRNAs and proteins of known synaptic plasticity products (Specific Aim 2). Using this approach, we will direct our efforts to provide an analysis of how particular learned experiences persistently modify CA1 neurons at the level of CA3- CA1 and EC-CA1 synaptic inputs to gain insight toward the identification and organization of memory traces within synaptic circuits of the hippocampus. We hope to expand our understanding of how neural ensembles support memory at the systems level by investigating how learned information modulates the synaptic circuits that underlie the ensemble activity. As such, this scientific effort is expected to bridge the scales of the synaptome and the connectome. |
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| 2021 | Alarcon, Juan Marcos Libien, Jenny (co-PI) [⬀] |
R25Activity Code Description: For support to develop and/or implement a program as it relates to a category in one or more of the areas of education, information, training, technical assistance, coordination, or evaluation. |
@ Suny Downstate Medical Center REACH is an 8-week pipeline summer course for minorities and underrepresented college and high school students interested in careers in neuroscience. Developed, together with Drs. Jenny Libien, MD, Ph.D., and Juan Marcos Alarcon, Ph.D., the Research Experience in Autism for College and High School students (REACH) summer program, provides underrepresented college students an advantage in pursuing a career in the biomedical fields. The REACH course is a research centric program with supplementary modules aimed at enhancing the participants? knowledge of neurological disorders with emphasis in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) through comprehensive lectures and clinical experiences. Students also receive instruction in career development with emphasis in mental health disparities and cultural competence. These experiences will inform the student-generated hypotheses and project that the students will develop throughout the summer. The program recruits basic science investigators, physicians, clinicians and graduate (PhD and medical students) students as REACH mentors. Utilizing team-based and peer-mentoring strategies, the student participants with the aid of their dedicated faculty and graduate student mentors will develop research hypotheses regarding ASD that they will experimentally resolve by the conclusion of the 8-week program. By exposing the participants to a diverse population of mentors, we hope to impress upon them the path and attainability of a life in the neuroscience and biomedical fields. Our program?s long-term goal is twofold, first to increase access and retention of underrepresented minorities into the neuroscience/biomedical field. Second, to positively impact underrepresented communities through our students. |
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