Marta Zlatic | |
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| Born | 24 February 1977 |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA, PhD) |
| Spouse | Albert Cardona |
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| Scientific career | |
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| Thesis | Establishment of connectivity in the embryonic central nervous system of Drosophila. (2004) |
| Website | www2 |
Marta Zlatic (born 24 February 1977) [4] is a Croatian neuroscientist who is group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. [3] [5] Her research investigates how neural circuits generate behaviour. [1]
Zlatic is from Zagreb, Croatia. [6] [7] She has said that growing up she had excellent Latin and Greek teachers. [8] She was awarded a full scholarship to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge. During her summer holidays from Cambridge, Zlatic studied linguistics and Russian at the University of Zagreb. Alongside her studies, Zlatic was involved with the Cambridge theatre scene, taking part in Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's plays. [6] As an undergraduate student Zlatic attended the lectures of Mike Bate, where he discussed the neural circuits of fruit flies. She enjoyed the lectures so much that she applied for a postgraduate degree. [6] During her doctoral research Zlatic looked at the development of neurons in Drosophila . [9] [6] As the nervous system starts to form, neurons start to produce axons and dendrites. [6] Zlatic showed that sensory neurons, which allow for sight, sound, pain and touch, look for particular locations in the nervous system using positional cues.
After earning her doctorate, Zlatic was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge which allowed her to travel internationally and study the assembly of neural circuits. [8] In 2009 Zlatic started her independent career at the Janelia Research Campus. [7] [10] At Janelia she learnt about the genetic tools used to manipulate the types of neurons in Drosophila. [8] Zlatic has dedicated her career to the study of the nervous system, in particular the positional cue known as the slit protein which controls how sensory neuron axons start and stop growing. She showed that slit proteins control branching along the mediolateral axis but not the dorsoventral axis, indicating that there are positional cues in three-dimensions.[ citation needed ]
Zlatic is interested the complex functions of the human brain, including language and communication. She studies these phenomena in the Drosophila larva (maggot). [6] She made use of electron microscopy to map the entire Drosophila connectome, [11] and studies the strengths of the connections between neurons that are structurally connected. [12] By investigating the connectivity of these neurons it is hoped that these particular patterns could be associated with the formation of memories.
Her publications [3] include:
Zlatic is fluent in several languages, including Croatian, English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Ancient Greek, and Latin. [6] Alongside her enthusiasm for languages and neuroscience, Zlatic is an actress. [6] She is married to neuroscientist Albert Cardona . [8]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to neuroscience:
Axon guidance is a subfield of neural development concerning the process by which neurons send out axons to reach their correct targets. Axons often follow very precise paths in the nervous system, and how they manage to find their way so accurately is an area of ongoing research.
A connectome is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, and may be thought of as its "wiring diagram". An organism's nervous system is made up of neurons which communicate through synapses. A connectome is constructed by tracing the neuron in a nervous system and mapping where neurons are connected through synapses.
Connectomics is the production and study of connectomes: comprehensive maps of connections within an organism's nervous system. More generally, it can be thought of as the study of neuronal wiring diagrams with a focus on how structural connectivity, individual synapses, cellular morphology, and cellular ultrastructure contribute to the make up of a network. The nervous system is a network made of billions of connections and these connections are responsible for our thoughts, emotions, actions, memories, function and dysfunction. Therefore, the study of connectomics aims to advance our understanding of mental health and cognition by understanding how cells in the nervous system are connected and communicate. Because these structures are extremely complex, methods within this field use a high-throughput application of functional and structural neural imaging, most commonly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electron microscopy, and histological techniques in order to increase the speed, efficiency, and resolution of these nervous system maps. To date, tens of large scale datasets have been collected spanning the nervous system including the various areas of cortex, cerebellum, the retina, the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular junctions.
Rachel Wilson is an American professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Wilson's work integrates electrophysiology, calcium imaging, molecular genetics, connectomics, computational modeling, and behavior to explore how neural circuits are organized to sense complex environments, learn associations between environmental features, and organize adaptive behavioral responses.
Hyunjune Sebastian Seung is President at Samsung Electronics & Head of Samsung Research and Anthony B. Evnin Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science. Seung has done influential research in both computer science and neuroscience. He has helped pioneer the new field of connectomics, "developing new computational technologies for mapping the connections between neurons," and has been described as the cartographer of the brain.
Andrea Hilary Brand is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She heads a lab investigating nervous system development at the Gurdon Institute and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She developed the GAL4/UAS system with Norbert Perrimon which has been described as “a fly geneticist's Swiss army knife”.
The White House BRAIN Initiative is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.
A Drosophila connectome is a list of neurons in the Drosophila melanogaster nervous system, and the chemical synapses between them. The fly's nervous system consists of the brain plus the ventral nerve cord, and both are known to differ considerably between male and female. Dense connectomes have been completed for the female adult brain, the male nerve cord, and the female larval stage. The available connectomes show only chemical synapses - other forms of inter-neuron communication such as gap junctions or neuromodulators are not represented. Drosophila is the most complex creature with a connectome, which had only been previously obtained for three other simpler organisms, first C. elegans. The connectomes have been obtained by the methods of neural circuit reconstruction, which over the course of many years worked up through various subsets of the fly brain to the almost full connectomes that exist today.
Neurogenesis is the process by which nervous system cells, the neurons, are produced by neural stem cells (NSCs). This occurs in all species of animals except the porifera (sponges) and placozoans. Types of NSCs include neuroepithelial cells (NECs), radial glial cells (RGCs), basal progenitors (BPs), intermediate neuronal precursors (INPs), subventricular zone astrocytes, and subgranular zone radial astrocytes, among others.
Neural circuit reconstruction is the reconstruction of the detailed circuitry of the nervous system of an animal. It is sometimes called EM reconstruction since the main method used is the electron microscope (EM). This field is a close relative of reverse engineering of human-made devices, and is part of the field of connectomics, which in turn is a sub-field of neuroanatomy.
Vanessa Julia Ruta is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila melanogaster. She is the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University and, as of 2021, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Gregory Stephen Xavier Edward Jefferis is a British neuroscientist known for his work on the circuit basis of olfactory perception in the vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster. He is a tenured Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) and associated with the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.
Joshua T. Vogelstein is an American biomedical engineer. He is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he sits at the Center for Imaging Science. Vogelstein also holds joint appointments in the departments of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biostatistics, and Neuroscience. He has appointments in the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Sciences, Institute for Computational Medicine, Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, and the Mathematical Institute for Data Science.
Jeff W. Lichtman is an American neuroscientist. He is the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Santiago Ramón y Cajal Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He is best known for his pioneering work developing the neuroimaging connectomic technique known as Brainbow.
Target selection is the process by which axons selectively target other cells for synapse formation. Synapses are structures which enable electrical or chemical signals to pass between nerves. While the mechanisms governing target specificity remain incompletely understood, it has been shown in many organisms that a combination of genetic and activity-based mechanisms govern initial target selection and refinement. The process of target selection has multiple steps that include axon pathfinding when neurons extend processes to specific regions, cellular target selection when neurons choose appropriate partners in a target region from a multitude of potential partners, and subcellular target selection where axons often target particular regions of a partner neuron.
Nilay Yapici is a Turkish neuroscientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she is the Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and Adelson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. Yapici studies the neural circuits underlying decision making and feeding behavior in fruit fly models.
Carsen Stringer is an American computational neuroscientist and Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus. Stringer uses machine learning and deep neural networks to visualize large scale neural recordings and then probe the neural computations that give rise to visual processing in mice. Stringer has also developed several novel software packages that enable cell segmentation and robust analyses of neural recordings and mouse behavior.
Hongkui Zeng is the Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, where she leads the creation of open-access datasets and tools to accelerate neuroscience discovery. In 2011-2014 Zeng led the team that created the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, which indicates which regions of the mouse brain are connected to which other regions. Since then, she has led the creation of atlases of neuronal cell types in the brain of humans and mice.
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