Report: The 11th BRI International Symposium

The 11th annual BRI international symposium was held online on February 19, 2021. The topic of this symposium was "From single cell to systems neuroscience". We had 13 excellent speakers, including 4 speakers from abroad (Dr. Loren Looger, HHMI Janelia/UC San Diego; Dr. Valentin Nägerl, Univ. Bordeaux, France; Dr. Hirofumi Morishita, Mount Sinai NY, US; Dr. Hiroshi Ito, Max Planck, Germany) and 9 speakers from Japan. Thankfully, 203 people joined this symposium (132 people from outside of the university, including world-wide audience from 12 countries), providing active discussion throughout the symposium.

The brain is quite complicated, constituted by various biological level components - from molecular, cellular, circuits to systems levels. The 13 speakers in this symposium talked about their unique approaches to understand one of the most complicated biological systems - brain. Drs. Loren Looger, Valentin Nägerl, Takeharu Nagai, Yasushi Okada, Masanori Murayama, Tomomi Nemoto, and Itaru Imayoshi gave excellent talks about the tool development that allowed for super-sensitive, wide-field, high spatio-temporal resolution, or deep imaging of neural activity and molecular dynamics in the brain. Drs. Yukiko Goda and Akiko Hayashi-Takagi focused on synaptic physiology and pathophysiology to understand the mechanism of brain function and dysfunction. Drs. Hirofumi Morishita, Hiroshi Ito, Kazunari Miyamichi and Sakiko Honjo used cutting-edge techniques to address their unique and interesting questions in various fields in neuroscience. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to hold this year's symposium via online, which enabled easier attendance in this symposium from all over the world. Indeed, the excellent speakers and audience with great scientific diversity enjoyed quite active, bidirectional and high quality communications during the symposium.

We would like to thank all the speakers, attendees and administrative staff members for their great contributions to this successful symposium. See you again next year.

By Prof Takayasu Mikuni (Dept of Cellular Neuropathology)

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