Edwin R. Griff Associate Professor Ph.D., Purdue University Neurobiology
Address: Edwin Griff Department of Biological Sciences, ML006 University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0006	Telephone: (513) 556-9739 FAX: (513) 556-5299 Email: Edwin.Griff@UC.Edu

The overall goal of my research is to understand the physiological mechanisms that produce sensation. My current research investigates the sense of smell, olfaction. In olfaction, chemical odorants stimulate olfactory receptor neurons in the nose, which in turn stimulate neurons in the olfactory bulb of the brain called mitral cells. These cells respond to stimuli by producing nerve impulses (action potentials), and the primary strategy used in my lab is to record these electrical responses using electrophysiological techniques. Thus, a student joining my lab would learn to stimulate and record the responses of neurons in the olfactory system.

Important physiological questions include: how are the various cells are connected to each other in neural circuits; how does each cell generate its response; do these responses interact in time and space, and finally, how do these responses code olfactory information? Recent anatomical and molecular data suggests that the olfactory bulb is organized into units called glomeruli where about 1000 olfactory receptor neurons, each expressing the same receptor protein, converge onto about 25 mitral cells. To what aspect of an odorant do these cells respond? Do they all respond in the same way to stimulation? Do they all exhibit the same pattern of background activity in the absence of stimulation? How do these cells interact with mitral cells in adjacent glomeruli? These are some of the specific questions that we hope to answer in the next few years.

My previous work involved the visual system, examining functional interactions between rod photoreceptors and the retinal pigment epithelium. We showed that absorption of light by rods produced a sequence of membrane potential changes mediated by a light-evoked decrease in extracellular potassium. A rapid apical membrane hyperpolarization was followed by a delayed basal membrane depolarization, and these epithelial membrane changes produced slow components of the electroretinogram, the c-wave and fast-oscillation trough. Subsequent studies have linked these electrical changes to ion transport across the epithelium, and visual manifestations of cystic fibrosis.