Khalid Saidov
Post Doc
khalid.saidov@donders.ru.nl
fter obtaining a medical degree in Russia I worked a short time as a physician and then moved to behavioral neuroscience. During my work as a junior research scientist in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. med. Konstantin Anokhin at the National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute in Moscow in Russia I explored the neuronal mechanisms of episodic memory linking, also known as memory co-allocation. In this study I have shown that two distinct contextual memories can be associated in mice within intermediate and long-term time intervals. Using the ex vivo imaging memory engrams in the hippocampus, amygdala and different regions of neocortex I analyzed the overlap of neurons activated during retrieval of distinct episodic memories and supposed that shared neuronal populations link these cognitive episodes.
During my doctoral study in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. med. Hannah Monyer at Heidelberg University in Germany I investigated the functional diversity for distinct populations of medial septal (MS) GABAergic interneurons in reward-associated spatial memory. Specifically, I exploited an eight-arm radial maze task, chemogenetics and histological methods in transgenic mice to decipher the role of parvalbumin (PV+) and calbindin (CB+) positive GABAergic cells in the MS. In this study I have shown that these neuronal populations differentially target the hippocampus and parahippocampal areas and differently contribute to working and long-term memory on the eight-arm radial maze.
My research in the laboratory of Dr. Lisa Genzel is focused on neural mechanisms for acquisition, retrieval and update of semantic memory using different molecular methods of tagging, imaging and manipulating memory engrams.