Guang Yang
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
The prefrontal cortex (PFC), the front part of the brain involved in thinking, memory and controlling responses, can go quiet or misfire after injury or medical treatment. This research studies how changes in PFC circuits contribute to two clinical problems.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
neuropathic pain
chronic pain
prefrontal cortex
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Test whether glutamate-releasing inputs from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the prefrontal cortex weaken after peripheral nerve injury and drive chronic pain, using in vivo calcium imaging and cell type- and projection-specific chemogenetics in mice.
- Determine whether activating the VTA-to-PFC glutamate pathway reverses established neuropathic pain without dopamine, by using CRISPR/Cas9 to delete tyrosine hydroxylase, an enzyme needed to make dopamine.
- Define how local inhibitory circuits and hippocampal projections to the prefrontal cortex contribute to anesthesia-induced neuronal hyperactivity and cognitive changes, using calcium imaging, viral circuit tracing and chemogenetics.
- Test whether GABA-acting anesthetics trigger a sustained unfolded protein response, a cellular stress program, in astrocytes that reduces synapse-building factors and causes synapse loss and memory decline.
- Test whether restoring astrocyte function with a gene delivery strategy that crosses the blood-brain barrier alleviates neurocognitive deficits after anesthesia.
More about the research
One is chronic pain after nerve injury. The other is memory and attention problems after general anesthesia. Both projects study mice and combine in vivo calcium imaging, a way to watch neurons fire in living animals, with tools that switch specific cell types on or off.
Why it matters
Neuropathic pain affects millions of people and is difficult to treat. Identifying the VTA-to-prefrontal glutamate pathway as a driver of chronic pain could point to new therapeutic targets. General anesthetics may cause cognitive decline, especially in infants and older adults. Understanding the neuron and astrocyte mechanisms involved could help optimize anesthesia practice and lead to targeted strategies, such as astrocyte-directed gene delivery, to prevent perioperative neurocognitive disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jing Wang
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Map how pain signals change the flow of information among the somatosensory, anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex in rats, and test whether real-time, light-based disruption of S1 changes pain behavior.
Jocelyn Richard
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Test whether separate neurons in the ventral pallidum encode the incentive value of reward cues versus the expected value of outcomes, using in vivo single-unit electrophysiology to record individual neurons during cue presentations.
Elizabeth Mietlicki-Baase
University at Buffalo, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether activating amylin receptors in the ventral tegmental area suppresses rapid dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens core in response to fat in the mouth, measured with fast-scan cyclic voltammetry.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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