E-Mail In the United States, one in 10 babies are born too soon, resulting in complications that can affect their locomotor development and influence such simple tasks as balance, walking and standing later in life. A new peer-reviewed study by Children's National Hospital, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ( PNAS), explores exactly what neural circuitry of the cerebellum is affected due to complications that occur around the time of birth causing these learning deficits, and finds a specific type of neurons -- Purkinje cells -- to play a central role. Up until now, there has been a sparsity of techniques available to measure neuronal activity during locomotor learning tasks that engage the cerebellum. To surmount this challenge, Children's National used a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together a team of neuroscientists with neonatologists who leveraged their joint expertise to devise a novel and unique way to measure real-time Purkinje cell activity in a pre-clinical model with relevance to humans.