The BRAIN Viral Vector Service and Distribution Core will serve as a resource for the maintenance, propagation, and distribution of viral vectors that are used by neuroscientists for neural circuit identification and manipulation, as well as for preclinical translational studies.
Traditional file-based neuroimaging data management and integration strategies have shown increasing limitations in accommodating the meteoric growth in both the scale and complexity of today’s neuroimaging data. The sophisticated software and hardware pipelines required in many of today’s neuroimaging studies have produced numerous platform-specific data files that are increasingly difficult to parse, exchange, and understand by the broader research community.
Advances in neuroscience depend on robust in vivo and in vitro models with innovative technologies to carry out functional and mechanistic studies accompanied by advanced imaging techniques. The Human Brain Organogenesis Program (HBOP), Behavioral and Functional Neuroscience Laboratory (BFNL), Gene Vector and Virus Core (GVVC), and Neuroscience Microscopy Services (NMS) make up a platform, the Stanford Neuroscience Research Center (SNRC), for centralization and dissemination of innovative neuroscience models, reagents and methods.
This proposal will disseminate FlyWire, a Drosophila whole brain connectomics resource. We used advances in AI to segment all neurons from a whole brain EM volume called FAFB. The automated segmentation is of high enough quality that, in combination with innovative proofreading tools, scientists can relatively quickly proofread circuits of interest. The community of current collaborators includes about 160 scientists from 40 labs, who have so far succeeded at proofreading more than 15% of the neurons in the fly brain. Several publications have resulted, and more are on the way.
The goal of this project is to disseminate MAPseq and BARseq to the broader neuroscience community. These are novel methods developed in my laboratory based on high-throughput DNA sequencing for determining neuronal circuitry. Neurons transmit information to distant brain regions via long-range axonal projections. In some cases, functionally distinct populations of neurons are intermingled within a small region.
We propose to create VOrtex, a Virtual Observatory for the Cortex: Spanning the Scales of Organelles, Cells, Circuits, and Dynamics. The observatory will disseminate an existing dataset: an automated reconstruction of all cells in a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex, along with the synaptic connectivity of the neurons and calcium-imaged responses to video stimuli. The cubic millimeter volume spans all layers of cortex and four visual areas (V1, LM, AL, RL). A team of human proofreaders will detect and correct the remaining errors in the automated segmentation.
We plan to provide software support services for Neuropixels probes, a groundbreaking new tool for recording electrical signals from the brain. These probes—which were created by IMEC, a world-renowned nanoelectronics research center, in collaboration with four funding agencies (HHMI, Allen Institute, Gatsby Foundation, and Wellcome Trust)—will become publicly available in July 2018. Each device consists of a single hair-like shank containing nearly 1000 recording sites, each of which can measure voltage changes with sub-millisecond precision.
The goal of this proposal is to disseminate high resolution large volume serial section electron microscopy data to neuroscientists. Using our electron microscopy facility, we will provide user training on the use of these new technologies and provide access to our specialized facilities so that they may generate permanent ultrathin sections and create data sets amenable for neural circuit analysis or neural and glial cell type analysis.
The central nervous system (CNS) changes throughout life, and its interactions with the world produce activity- dependent plasticity that enables it to acquire and maintain useful behaviors. Recent scientific and technical advances support the development of systems that create novel interactions with the CNS that can induce and guide beneficial plasticity.
Two-photon laser scanning microscopy powers many projects in the.
