Achievement

IGERT trainee Jon Caplan in the Marder laboratory has been collaborating with previous IGERT trainee Lamont Tang to understand how temperature compensation in motor programs generated in cold-blooded animals is achieved. To accomplish this, trainees combine computational models with experimental electrophysiological work. They show from a combination of experiments and computational models that even though firing frequencies change with temperature, the phase between elements of the network is maintained by balancing opposing currents with similar temperature dependencies. This work was published in PLoS Biology (Tang LS, et al. 2010 Precise Temperature Compensation of Phase in a Rhythmic Motor Pattern. PLoS Biol 8(8): e1000469. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000469 - PMC2930868)