BIO

My name is James Fair and I'm majoring in Biology on a pre-dental track. I was interested in doing research at FSU to apply some of the general concepts of Biology and Anatomy/Physiology that I have learned over the past few years. While there are no "dental-related" forms of research for me to pursue, there were still a plethora of projects here at FSU that I was keen on getting involved with.

Morphological Characterization of Cortical Premotor Neurons of Juvenile Zebra Finches

Abstract

There are many factors that can potentially impact the development and functioning of the nervous system within various living organisms; our research specifically focused on how auditory experiences influence the development of morphological features of the HVC neurons within a sample of Taeniopygia guttata, more commonly known as the zebra finch. These birds produce a sequence of vocalizations that are learned by communicating with others of their species. The HVC and X-regions of the zebra finch’s brain are where these vocalizations are transmitted and received. However, only males can produce proper song patterns while females are only able to recognize them; know this, our study focused on observing the differences in the neurons of male and female birds respectively. We hypothesized that there were differences in the morphological features between male and female specimens. Microscopy images of neurons from the different groups were taken and utilized to create three-dimensional Z-stacked images were later traced and analyzed using online imaging software. With the samples that were traced we were able to observe various morphological features of the cells such as their total dendritic length, soma area, number of primary dendrites, relative position within the sample, among many other traits. We found that male HVCx neurons were typically comprised of a larger soma area and greater quantity of primary dendrites. However, the individually-filled HVC neurons of females consisted of arborizations that covered a greater area of the HVC region than those of males.

Keywords: HVC Neurons, Zebra Finches