Penn State research on brain activity during rest could help in understanding Alzheimer’s

A Penn State researcher said new findings about how mice brains function during rest could have implications for understanding how Alzheimer’s disease develops in humans.

Xiao Liu, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and faculty co-hire in the Institute of Computational and Data Science, and his team published the research Nov. 18 in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team analyzed a public dataset from the Allen Institute, finding that individual neurons fired in coordinated cascades when mice were at rest – a process previously thought to be random.

“If we better understand the functions of neural cascades during rest, we can potentially get closer to the mystery of how Alzheimer’s develops,” Liu said.

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