Sleep & Cognitive Development
Decoding immature neural activity from multiple brain areas in freely behaving rodent pups to reveal mechanisms at play during developmental sleep.
Hi. Welcome to Boccara Lab.
We combine high density electrophysiology, optogenetics and computational analyses to investigate how sleep contributes to healthy cognitive development.
If you are interested in joining us, please check our hiring page.
The lab is focused on the following research lines:
Models of sleep deprivation
Exploiting recent advance in gene editing, molecular and viral tools to engineer rodent models of developmental sleep deprivation (Chemogenetic, Optogenetic, CRISPR)
Technological Innovations
Engineering wireless and fully implantable electrophysiological “brain machine interface” to decode and manipulate brain activity in real time in freely-behaving rodents.
Computational Tools
Developing analytical pipelines and machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and decode multiunit activity codes and oscillatory events across brain regions.
Decoding Brain Representations
Revealing sleep and wake neural computations that support learning, updating and consolidation of memory traces, as well as the neural code underlying spatial cognition.
Metabolism and Sleep
Monitoring the communications between the brain and the adipose tissue during adolescent sleep to better understand how bad sleep habits may lead to the emergence of metabolic disorders
Autophagy and Sleep
Developing tools and strategies to study autophagy during sleep in an invertebrate (Drosophila) and a rodent (rat) model of sleep deprivation.
Sleep and interneuron maturation
Combining targeted sleep disruption with 3D spatial transcriptomics and high-resolution imaging to understand how sleep impacts the maturation of interneurons and glia across postnatal development.
Juvenile stress and adulthood responses
Investigating the impact of childhood adversities on adulthood psychopathology in rodent model using in vivo electrophysiology and behavioral assays.
