protocols

Crab stomatogastric ganglion dissection guides

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When I first started in the Marder Lab as a graduate student, I had the good fortune of being trained in the crab stomatogastric ganglion dissection by a very patient and helpful senior grad student. I also got to watch several other experienced dissectors perform this dissection. This allowed me to come up with my own customized dissection protocol that combined the best aspects of the varied techniques I saw. I wanted to document my dissection protocol in the hopes of helping others who might be trying to learn this dissection, so I made a two-part illustrated guide. This ended up being incorporated into my first official publication in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (Gutierrez and Grashow, 2009).

These guides are still available on the resource page of the Marder lab website, but I’ve made them available here as well.

Dissection part 1 (gross dissection)

Dissection part 2 (fine dissection)

Gutierrez GJ, Grashow RG (2009). Cancer borealis stomatogastric nervous system dissection. J Vis Exp. Mar 23(25). pii: 1207.

How to build a spiking predictive coding model

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These notes are the first of many illustrated notes about my research, and science in general, that I will post.

This is An illustrated primer on constructing a circuit from optimization (click the link for the pdf). It details the approach I’ve used in my most recent research while I was a postdoc in Sophie Deneve’s lab at the Group for Neural Theory in Paris, France. I was working with Sophie’s predictive coding network with spiking neurons, so if you’re interested in the work from her paper (Boerlin, et al, PLoS, 2013), this closely follows their machine-learning-inspired approach to constructing a neural network of spiking units.