Principal Investigator
Synapses are the main conduit of information flow in the brain. The Fenselau lab investigates how transmission across these essential connections enables communication within neural circuits that control systemic metabolism. Our lab focuses on advancing our current understanding of synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity in neural circuits that regulate food intake, energy expenditure and glucose homeostasis.
An organism’s ability to tightly coordinate systemic metabolism is critical for health and survival. Such coordination is achieved by multiple distinct neural cell populations that sense energy-related signals and relay this information to downstream brain sites to orchestrate diverse metabolic processes such as feeding behavior, energy expenditure and glucose homeostasis. To achieve this, it is essential that communication within these circuits is efficient and highly precise as well as appropriately adapted to energy and nutrient availability. The Fenselau lab investigates synapse physiology and synaptic plasticity – such as long-term potentiation – of discrete neural circuits that regulate metabolic processes.
Axons are like long and narrow roads connecting a main factory to outposts located far away. Avoiding traffic accidents and maintaining the efficiency of the outposts is essential during our lifetime. Understanding how this is achieved is at the core of our research.
The overarching goal of our research is to detail how synaptic communication within defined neural circuits relates the control of systemic metabolism. Furthermore, we aim to define how synaptic dysfunction in these circuits contributes to pathological conditions such as obesity or diabetes.To advance our current understanding of synapse physiology and synaptic plasticity in defined neural circuits, we combine various state-of-the-art neuroscience techniques with mouse genetic approaches. This powerful combination provides a direct means to causally relate synaptic communication in defined neural circuits with physiological processes at the cellular, tissue and organismal levels.
We are currently addressing the following three key fundamental research questions:
To this end, we employ a wide range of diverse, but complementary methodologies, including brain slice electrophysiology, recombinase-expressing mice, AAV viral approaches, optogenetics, chemogenetics, and in vivo imaging techniques. The powerful combination of these approaches allows us to study synaptic communication in defined neural circuits that have a clear metabolic function. Further, these approaches enable us to study how synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity within neural circuits could become dysregulated and how this relates to pathological conditions such as obesity or diabetes.
Principal Investigator