Saobo Lei is both a physician and a PhD neuroscientist with a lifelong drive to learn the intricate details about how the brain works—and what can go wrong and why. That quest now has him here at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences as assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology, Physiology and Therapeutics, probing the intimate details of how individual neurons—the brain’s basic building blocks—behave at the cellular level.

“We’re very interested in discovering what exactly neurons do in terms of learning and memory,” said Lei, who got his MD degree at Sun
Yat-sen University and his PhD at the University of Alberta. And those connections will lead to a more intimate and accurate understanding of brain problems, such as memory loss, learning disabilities, anxiety, and a host of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

In scientific parlance, Lei said, “We use a variety of techniques including electrophysiology, immunocytochemisty, imaging, tissue culture, molecular biology, and in vivo physiology and animal models to study the functional changes of the central nervous system in physiological and pathological conditions.”

What that all boils down to is figuring out what happens between neurons involved in memory and learning and other brain functions.

“We want to know how they do what they do, how and why those functions change and cause problems, and what chemicals can be used to help those neurons do what they’re supposed to do,” Lei said. This voyage of discovery starts with microscopically thin slices of brain tissue that Lei and his research team put into little test chambers.

We use a variety of techniques to study the functional changes of the central nervous system in physiological and pathological conditions.

“Then we inject the sample with various chemicals such as neurotransmitters—substances that help neurons communicate with each other—and neuropeptides,” he said. These peptides are protein-like molecules that also are used by neurons to communicate with each other and are related to a number of brain functions, from eating behavior to learning and memory.

Lei and his team are particularly interested in two areas of the brain that are critical to learning and memory:
the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex (EC).