Informatics

Despite substantial progress characterizing neural responses, it is particularly challenging to determine causal interactions within recurrently connected circuits due to the confounding influence of the interconnections. This proposed project pioneers a nascent field of closed-loop computational neuroscience that enables real-time feedback stimulation during experiments to decouple recurrently connected elements and make stronger causal inferences about their interactions.

Understanding the brain processes underlying alcohol use and misuse are essential for the development of effective treatments for alcohol use disorder or AUD. Human brain imaging has greatly contributed to our current understanding of AUD, but much more remains to be understood. Most recently, human neuroscience has been transformed by the integration of network science and neuroimaging (now coined network neuroscience). Functional brain imaging is used to generate networks to examine interconnected groups of synchronized brain regions.

The basal ganglia are a collection of subcortical nuclei studied for their contributions to movement, action selection, habit formation, and reward learning as well as their dysfunction in movement disorders. While basal ganglia processing of cortical inputs and the emergence of the direct and indirect pathway communication channels within the striatum have been the subject of extensive investigation, the integration of these channels at the level of basal ganglia output nuclei including the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr) has been relatively understudied.

Detailed description of the proposed use of the animals, including species, strains, ages, sex, and number to be used; Dissociated, primary cultures will be prepared from the cortex of new born mice of either sex (mus musculus, Postnatal day 0-1). These experiments will be performed using pups obtained from Vglut1-IRES2-Cre strains mated with Floxopatch (Lou et al., 2016) strains so that pyramidal cells will express channel rhodopsin CheRiff and voltage indicator QuasR2. Up to 5 cultures can be grown, which can be used for 5 experiments.

The ability to listen and identify sounds in the presence of competing background noise is a critical function of the healthy auditory system. Humans with normal hearing can easily carry a conversation even with relatively high levels of noise and in complex auditory environments, such as a busy restaurant. Yet, for individuals with hearing loss even moderate levels of background noise can adversely impact sound recognition. Understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie recognition in noise is thus of high clinically relevance.

CRCNS Research Proposal: Collaborative Research: Multimodal Dynamic Causal Learning for Neuroimaging A Project Description A.1 Introduction Many analyses of fMRI and other neuroimaging data aim to discover the underlying causal or commu- nication structures that generated that activity.1,2 An accurate characterization of these brain structures is important for understanding neural circuits, systems-level neuroscience, and the neural bases of var- ious cognitive psychological phenomena or mental diseases.

The purpose of this proposal is to disseminate polymer microelectrode arrays and promote their integrated into neuroscience research practice. Such polymer neural interfaces are mechanically compliant to promote stability of the device-tissue interface and versatile in that both surface and penetrating electrode arrays can be produced with the same technology.

Summary Invasive neurostimulation is an established technique in the therapy of movement disorders and epilepsy, and shows promise for amelioration of psychiatric and cognitive disorders. Recently, several implantable neurostimulation hardware platforms have begun to incorporate sensing of cortical and subcortical field potential activity, with the capability for wireless streaming from the internal device to external computers over years.