Cooperative Agreements

Abstract Central to human and animal cognition is the idea of internal models: an internal repository of knowledge about the structure of the world and its affordances that enables prediction and planning. The existence of such models is fundamental to experience. As we move through the world, the raw instantaneous sensory information that we receive is highly impoverished and dynamic relative to the rich, organized, stable and detailed nature of experience.

ABSTRACT Sleep occupies a third of our lives and sleep-related ailments cost an estimated $100 billion per year, yet the mechanisms governing its regulation remain poorly understood. Despite the substantial progress that has been made in the discovery and understanding of specific sleep-promoting and wake-promoting neuronal and molecular pathways, what is missing is an integrated understanding of how these mechanisms work together in the brain to regulate sleep and wake as whole-brain behavioral states.

Abstract Vision is an active process: we move our head and eyes to explore the sensory world. This is particularly important in situations where a stationary view provides limited information, such as when looking for an object that is occluded or obscured, which is common in complex natural scenes.

Project Summary (Overall: Cracking the Olfactory Code) Sensation drives perception, which informs decisions and actions. Olfaction is the main sense used by most animals to interact with the environment. However, olfaction remains shrouded in mystery — we do not know which molecular odorant features matter to the olfactory system and which do not, how information about these features is recombined to create holistic odor representations within the brain, or how those representations relate to perception.

Project Summary: Overall Local networks within the spinal cord represent an essential computational layer for the control of limb-driven motor behaviors, integrating descending and sensory inputs to coordinate dexterous motor output. Significant advances have been made in characterizing the developmental programs that specify the core cardinal interneuron types that make up these motor networks. This knowledge has been used to develop a battery of mouse genetic reagents for spinal circuit anatomical and functional dissection.

Project abstract Animals, including humans, interact with their environment via self-generated and continuous actions that enable them to explore and subsequently experience the positive and negative consequences of their actions. As a result of their interactions with the environment, animals alter their future behavior, typically in a manner that maximizes positive and minimizes negative outcomes.

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.

Project summary Over the past five years, the Allen Institute has built two unique in-house pipelines for in vivo electro- and optical-physiology: together they form the Allen Brain Observatory. We used this observatory to freely and openly share calcium imaging data from ~60,000 cells from 221 running mice viewing standard visual stimuli; in October 2019, we will release Neuropixels electrophysiology recordings from ~100,000 cells from 100 mice under the same conditions, all registered to a common anatomical coordinate system (CCFv3).

The field of neuroscience and the BRAIN Initiative in particular are amassing a wealth of informatics resources for managing, analyzing, and sharing data.