The Laboratory of Neuronal Ensembles Involved in Learned Behaviours (PI: Eisuke Koya) seeks to understand how learned associations about rewarding substanced (e.g. food, drugs) and their associated environmental stimuli are encoded in a minority of sparsely distributed, behaviourally activated neurons called 'neuronal ensembles'. Our goals are to identify the brain areas where these neuronal ensembles reside, and to further characterise the alterations in intrinsic membrane properties and synaptic physiology on these activated neurons that allow these learned associations to be established, maintained, and updated. We use a variety of transgenic  approaches, in which behaviourally activated neurons that express the activity-regulated protein 'Fos' can be selectively manipulated and electrophysiologically characterised.