Jordi Soriano's Lab

The Neurophysics Group of Jordi Soriano-Fradera studies collective phenomena in neuronal cultures, i.e. tissue from the cortex or hippocampus that is dissociated and plated on cover glasses.

Our research is oriented towards the understanding of the mechanisms that originate and maintain spontaneous activity, the relation between this activity and the underpinned circuitry, and the resilience of this activity to physical damage or chemical perturbations. In collaboration with medical teams at Hospital Clínic and Hospital de Bellvitge we also investigate neurodegenerative diseases ‘in vitro’, by comparing healthy and diseased circuits and investigating the action of drugs or genetic treatments to cure the diseases. We work in Sanfilippo, Huntington, Parkinson and Alzheimer.

In our lab we use a multi-culture platform to simultaneously prepare different cultures. Their activity is monitored through high-resolution, high-speed calcium imaging, finally procuring the individual traces of thousands of neurons whose analysis sheds light on the collective mechanisms shaping neuronal network activity.