News

NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded study opens the door to correlating deep brain activity and behavior

Success in flies and worms has inspired several efforts to reconstruct more complex mammalian brain circuits. Reconstructing a whole mouse brain using electron microscopy is the next logical step, but scaling from a fly to a mouse brain presents serious challenges.

The most comprehensive wiring map to date of the fruit fly brain has transformed the field of neuroscience, identifying new cell types and reconfiguring circuit models. Are neuroscientists now ready to tackle the mouse brain?

For the first time, scientists have recorded how our brains navigate physical space and keep track of others’ location.

NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded scientists used artificial intelligence to help redesign a nutrient grabbing, Venus flytrap-shaped bacterial protein into a highly sensitive serotonin sensor.

The National Institutes of Health will fund more than 175 grants, totaling nearly $500 million, through the NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, part of a large effort among federal and non-federal partners to use knowledge about how the brain works to develop more effective therapies for neurological disorders.

A professor of neurosciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Zador has run five miles a day, seven days a week since he was 18. “That’s when the ideas sort of click into place,” he says.

Recently, members of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Neuroethics Working Group (NEWG) and Multi-Council Working Group (MCWG) discussed racial inequities in neuroscience and biomedicine, COVID-19 impacts on research, and future BRAIN funding.

This funding opportunity announcement supports the development of technologies, production efforts, and dissemination resources for a cell type-specific armamentarium to study brain function across species.