Chia-Lin Wu |
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Appointment : Professor |
Lab:Learning and Memory Laboratory |
Education : Ph.D. |
University/Nation:National Tsing Hua University/Taiwan |
Tel: 03-211-8800#5159 |
E-mail : clwu@mail.cgu.edu.tw |
Research website : https://clwu88.wixsite.com/chialinwu-lab |
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Research interests: Memories make us who we are. Many people suffering from brain dysfunctions have difficulties even to remember and recognize themselves since the serious memory lost. The memory lost (amnesia) caused by aging, neurodegeneration, or diseases greatly affects the quality of life in the patients. Therefore, understanding how memories are formed and encoded in our brain will be one of the most important things in neuroscience field. However, how the memory is processed, consolidated, stored, and retrieved in the brain still a mystery. The human brain is too complex which contains more than 100-billion of neurons and more than trillion of synapses. We use Drosophila melanogaster as a model to study memories, where the relatively small brain (~130,000 neurons) with powerful and sophisticated genetic tools that allowed us to manipulate the functions in specific populations of brain neurons in a living animal. Drosophila melanogaster can be trained to associated a specific odor with a specific punitive or rewarded signals to form memories. In our lab, we use whole-mount brain immunohistochemistry, live calcium brain imaging, and behavioral assays to dissect the neural circuits and molecular mechanisms that are required for memory formation in Drosophila. The experimental results from Drosophila could pave the way for understanding how memory is processed in the animal brain.
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