Elim HongNeuroscience Paris Seine (IBPS) - Inserm / Sorbonne Universités
Mes recherches
Our team aims to study how cholinergic neurotransmission plays a role in neural circuit formation and function during early development. I carried out my PhD at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (2003-2008) followed by two post-doctoral positions at the Children’s hospital in Washington DC (2009-2011) and the Carnegie Institute for Sciences (2011-2014). I obtained a CRN position with INSERM in 2014 and was awarded the ATIP-Avenir in 2015. I started my team in 2016 in the department of Neuroscience at the Institut de Biologie Paris Seine (IBPS). Since starting my team, we have enjoyed hosting a number of early career and established scientists from different fields around the world in our team. In addition, I have collaborated with scientists in diverse disciplines including physics, computational biology and musicology to interpret neuronal activity dynamics in a small transparent vertebrate animal model, the zebrafish.
Mon projet ATIP-Avenir
Role of cholinergic signaling on neuronal network formation in the habenulo-interpeduncular pathway
How neurons in the developing brain connect to each other to generate specific neuronal networks that mediate distinct behaviors is a central question in the field of neuroscience. Epidemiological studies on children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy show neurobehavioral defects, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and increased risk of substance abuse as adults. Rodents exposed to prenatal nicotine exhibit similar behavioral defects, suggesting that perturbation of early cholinergic signaling by nicotine exposure during development results in the modification of neuronal networks to have long-term consequences in behavior.
By combining pharmacological, genetic ablation and optogenetic approaches, this project proposes to uncover mechanisms for how cholinergic signaling participates in the establishment of neuronal networks during vertebrate central nervous system development. I will focus on a highly conserved, major cholinergic area of the brain, the habenulo-interpeduncular (Hb-IPN) pathway. The developing zebrafish provides an unparalleled opportunity for a comprehensive understanding of the role of neurotransmission in the establishment of neuronal connections in vivo at a single cell level, as well as defining how altering this process can result in long-term changes in the activity of neuronal networks at a local and global scale.