Synopsis of Research in Shanghai (September 13 - December 17)：
Guanchun Li is currently working on his dissertation, focused on the modeling molecular and cellular mechanism of LTP (long term potentiation) for CA1 pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus, which is thought to be the core mechanism in learning and memory in the brain. He has helped develop a computational model of the phosphorylation of CaMKII, a chemical which senses and integrates the calcium signal and is a star player of the LTP. It is similar to computational models in the literature but more simplistic and math solid and performs well qualitatively well with respect to the dynamics of the phosphorylated state of CaMKII observed in the literature. He is now extending the model into a compartmental model, which could describe the spatiotemporal dynamics of calcium signal more detaily, which is thought to encode the information stream to be learned. With the completion of the full dynamic model, he is expected to provide a biologically detailed model of plasticity change during the formation of place cells in CA1, which is a representative experiment case in the study of learning in the brain.