Annual Meeting Mini-Symposium Novel Approaches to Monitor and Manipulate Single Neurons In Vivo

The complexity of the vertebrate brain poses an enormous chal-lenge to experimental neuroscience. One way of dealing with this complexity has been to investigate different aspects of brain func-tion in widely different preparations, each best suited to address a particular question. Accordingly, cellular questions are typically addressed with intracellular recordings in in vitro preparations such as brain slices or neuronal cultures, whereas network behav-ior and sensory ormotor response properties are analyzed in vivo, often with extracellular recordings. This division of labor has proved to be an experimentally effective strategy. However, al-though there seems to be no limit to the wealth of data that can be generated in this way, integrating results derived in different preparations comes with its own set of challenges. The enormous difficulties encountered when one attempts to link cellular phe-nomena such as synaptic plasticity to systems properties such a