Category Archives: Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Oh, The Shame: Why Left-Handed People Are Left Out Of Neuroscience… – 2oceansvibe News

[imagesource: Shutterstock]

Before you snort at left-handed people for insisting that they get equal recognition, its worth noting that lefty discrimination has been going on for centuries.

In the Middle Ages, left-handers were often accused of consorting with the devil and, during the excesses of the Inquisition and the witch hunts of the 15th and 16th Century, left-handedness was at times considered sufficient to identify a woman as a witch.

That, as Im sure you know, didnt end well.

The 18th and 19th centuries werent great, either. Left-handers were often forced to write with their right hands, which was enforced by tying the childs left hand behind their back to make sure that the habit was instilled.

In the mid-twentieth century, in some parts of the world, this practice continued.

Now we know better, at least when it comes to schooling and witchcraft, but lefties are still excluded from some things, including studies in neuroscience.

VICE spoke to Emma Karlsson, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University in Wales, who says that its one of these rules of thumb that people learn when they start doing neuroscience, that including left-handed individuals is bad.

Excluding left-handers is supposedly an attempt to reduce variations in brain data.

The brain is comprised of two hemispheres which are not completely equal in their anatomy. When it comes to some things like language and motor skills, one of the hemispheres does most of the work.

With most right-handed people the left hemisphere of the brain takes that on, while left-handed people are often less reliant on that hemisphere. They might use both hemispheres, but predominantly the right side.

Because of their exclusion, theyre incredibly frustrated, says Lyam Bailey, a doctoral student in psychology and neuroscience, who is one of the few researchers who accepts them.

Its been thought that its just best to play it safe, be careful and exclude left-handers, Bailey said. That kind of mindset has become very deeply ingrained in cognitive neuroscience.

We dont know what we dont know, Bailey said. It might be the case that left-handers are more likely to exhibit differences in some characteristics, maybe with respect to memory or attention or brain structure. But we dont know that because theyre not being included in the research.

There is now a push to diversify data to provide a more accurate overview of the population of which left-handers account for roughly 10%.

When trying to figure out how the brain works, we need to account for all the ways a healthy brain can function, says Karlsson.

Left-handed people may not even have radically different brains for certain tasks. And there may be more variation in both left and right-handed peoples brains than were aware ofthe whole spectrum of lateral variation wont be revealed until we include lefties in brain research.

If youd like to read more into this topic, head here.

To all the lefties out there, keep up the good fight.

I salute you.

[source:vice]

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Oh, The Shame: Why Left-Handed People Are Left Out Of Neuroscience... - 2oceansvibe News

Neuroscience

New center to explore brain, immune system connections – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

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Discoveries will aid efforts to develop immune therapies for neurological diseases

A new center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has been established to unravel the close connections between the brain and the immune system. The Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG) will be led by Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, an international leader in the field of neuroimmunology.

As the brain reigns supreme over the human body, the immune system works 24/7 to defend the body from foreign invaders. For decades, however, the brain and the immune system were thought to operate independently of one another. But a growing body of evidence suggests the two are intimately connected in keeping the body healthy.

A new center has been established at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis to unravel the close connections between the brain and the immune system. Such endeavors could lead to new insight into neurological illnesses ranging from Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease to schizophrenia and autism that are linked to an immune system gone awry, and lay the groundwork for developing promising immune-based therapies to treat such illnesses.

The Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG) will be led by Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, an international leader in the new field of neuroimmunology, and the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor. Glia are brain cells that support neurons and the myriad neural connections in the brain. Theyre also involved in immune surveillance within the brain.

Neuroimmunology is one of the most exciting areas of biomedical research, said David H. Perlmutter, MD, executive vice chancellor for medical affairs, the George and Carol Bauer Dean of the School of Medicine, and the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Distinguished Professor. The center is conceptualized to leverage the world-class programs in immunology and neurosciences that have flourished at Washington University for many years and will foster collaborations that draw established and early-career scientists from many departments and diverse disciplines to explore the two-way dialogue between the brain and the immune system.

Such investigations are essential to designing innovative approaches to fight brain diseases and injuries, Perlmutter added. The center will also focus on areas that are ideal for urgently needed new therapies, so we envision that it will be a nidus for many new pharmaceutical industry partnerships. We are thrilled that Jony Kipnis is taking the helm and leading the way on this scientific journey.

Kipnis, who joined the School of Medicine faculty in July as a BJC Investigator, is highly regarded for his groundbreaking work in neuroimmunology. In 2015, his lab discovered a network of vessels that drains fluid, immune cells and small molecules from the brain into the lymph nodes, for the first time demonstrating a direct physical connection between the brain and the immune system.

It has long been known that every neurological disease has an immune component to it, and the assumption was that it was detrimental, said Kipnis, who is also a professor of pathology and immunology, of neurology, of neurosurgery and of neuroscience. But the immune system exists to protect and heal the body, not to destroy it. We want to know yet whether immune responses associated with neurological diseases indeed are beneficial helping to prop up and possibly repair damaged neurons or whether they are an underlying cause of illness. Our new center, through collaborations with numerous clinical and basic science departments, will cultivate and bring together scientists who want to be at the forefront of neuroimmunology and help answer such questions that could lead to entirely new approaches for treating diseases of the brain.

The School of Medicine, with its exceptional research strengths in neuroscience and immunology, plus broad and deep expertise in teasing apart the underlying molecular contributions to numerous neurological conditions linked to immune and inflammatory dysfunction such as Alzheimers disease, pain, itch, brain cancer, autism, and sleep disorders provides an unparalleled environment for the center. The new center also will be able to draw upon the exceptional expertise found in the School of Medicines McDonnell Genome Institute to investigate genetic and genomic components of neuroimmunology.

It is clear that inflammation plays an important role in Alzheimers disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, said David Holtzman, MD, the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor and head of the Department of Neurology. It will be important to better understand the details of this interaction as it may provide new innovative treatment approaches. This center will play an important role in supporting basic research to investigate how altering the immune system affects brain health and disease.

The new center is supported by the Departments of Neurology, of Neurosurgery, of Neuroscience and of Pathology and Immunology. Its current leadership team includes Kipnis, Holtzman, and Marco Colonna, MD, the Robert Rock Belliveau Professor of Pathology and Immunology. Holtzman and Colonna have uncovered intriguing links between inflammation and Alzheimers disease. As the center grows and evolves, more experts will be added to the leadership team.

Jony comes at a time of tremendous growth of our neurosciences and world-class immunology programs, said Richard Cote, MD, the Edward Mallinckrodt Professor and head of the Department of Pathology and Immunology. Already a leader, he will be a key part of building one of the great neuroimmunology programs in the world. As we face growing challenges in aging and neurodegenerative disease, we expect that fundamental approaches to these and other diseases of the brain will emanate from the BIG Center and the collaborations that will be enriched through the center.

The center will be a highly interactive and collaborative hub for scientists from all disciplines and backgrounds interested in understanding how the relationship between the brain and the immune system can be manipulated to treat neurological diseases. It will offer a seminar series, workshops to help establish collaborative projects, grant-brewing sessions and journal clubs.

Mentoring junior faculty is a passion of mine, and I hope that the center will be a greenhouse for new investigators and newcomers in the field, Kipnis said. We are planning to seek additional funding for exceptional projects in neuroimmunology and glia biology, with a goal to develop program projects and a neuroimmunology training program.

Our knowledge linking the brain and the immune system is still in its infancy, Kipnis continued. We have much to explore, and the field is wide open. Given the exceptional strengths of clinical and basic neuroscience and immunology here, there is no better place to explore this new field of neuroimmunology than at Washington University. I look forward to working with many tremendous colleagues here and establishing new collaborations throughout the school and the university to push the boundaries of neuroimmunology and glia research to the next frontier.

Washington University School of Medicines 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Childrens hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Childrens hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

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New center to explore brain, immune system connections - Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Neuroscience

Julich-Brain: A 3D probabilistic atlas of the human brain’s cytoarchitecture – Science Magazine

A present-day atlas of the human brain

Defining brain regions and demarking their spatial extent are important goals in neuroscience. A modern map of the brain's cellular structure, a cytoarchitectonic atlas, should provide maps of areas in three dimensions, integrate recent knowledge about brain parcellation, consider variations between individual brains, rely on reproducible workflows, and provide web-based links to other resources and databases. Amunts et al. created such an atlas based on serial histological sections of brain. They developed a computational framework and refined the current boundaries of the human brain based on cytoarchitectural patterns. This technique can easily be transferred to build brain atlases for other species or a spatial framework for other organs, other modalities, or multimodal maps for regions of interest at higher spatial scales. This research makes similar future attempts simultaneously reproducible and flexible.

Science, this issue p. 988

Cytoarchitecture is a basic principle of microstructural brain parcellation. We introduce Julich-Brain, a three-dimensional atlas containing cytoarchitectonic maps of cortical areas and subcortical nuclei. The atlas is probabilistic, which enables it to account for variations between individual brains. Building such an atlas was highly data- and labor-intensive and required the development of nested, interdependent workflows for detecting borders between brain areas, data processing, provenance tracking, and flexible execution of processing chains to handle large amounts of data at different spatial scales. Full cortical coverage was achieved by the inclusion of gap maps to complement cortical maps. The atlas is dynamic and will be adapted as mapping progresses; it is openly available to support neuroimaging studies as well as modeling and simulation; and it is interoperable, enabling connection to other atlases and resources.

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Julich-Brain: A 3D probabilistic atlas of the human brain's cytoarchitecture - Science Magazine

Neuroscience

Inhibition of key receptor implicated in post-stroke damage and recovery – News-Medical.Net

Many people who suffer a stroke are permanently disabled. Stroke remains the leading cause of long-term disability in the United States. Paralysis of one side of the body, speech and language problems, vision problems and memory loss are some of the major consequences of stroke injury.

Every year, nearly 800,000 people in the United States have a stroke. Even with recent advances in treatments to reduce damage and enhance recovery after stroke, solutions are significantly lacking.

Recently, UConn School of Medicine researchers published a paper in Experimental Neurology showing how they successfully inhibited an important receptor implicated in post-stroke damage and recovery.

The researchers specifically looked at ischemic stroke, which comprises 87% of strokes. Ischemic stroke occurs when there is a blockage in an artery leading to the brain. This reduces the amount of blood and oxygen getting to the brain, causing damage or death of brain cells.

Damaged or dying brain cells release excessive amounts of stored adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a molecule that carries energy within cells, leading to over-stimulation of its receptor P2X4 (P2X4R). When P2X4R is over-active, it causes a cascade of detrimental effects in brain cells, leading to ischemic brain injury.

In this study, the researchers found inhibition of P2X4R can regulate the activation of a kind of immune cell that plays a large role in post-stroke inflammation.

By partially short-term blocking this receptor, the researchers limited the over-stimulated immune response to improve both acute and chronic stroke recovery.

The method presented in this paper is particularly attractive as it only operates during this period of over-activation and does not inhibit normal functions of P2X4R during long-term recovery.

"Short-term P2X4R inhibition works perfectly to prevent brain damage immediately after stroke as well as during long-term recovery," author Rajkumar Verma, assistant professor of neuroscience at the UConn School of Medicine and the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center at UConn Health, says.

Using mouse models, the researchers observed improved balance and coordination, as well as reduced anxiety after their intervention.

The P2X4R inhibitor treatment decreased the total number of infiltrated leukocytes, which are white blood cells that promote ischemic injury when over abundant.

This treatment effectively reduced the cell surface expression and activation of P2X4R without reducing its total protein level in brain tissue after stroke injury.

One challenge many experimental drugs, including commercially available P2X4R inhibitors, face is insolubility, meaning they cannot enter the body in order to deliver the treatment.

The researchers are currently working with team members Dr. Bruce Liang, Dean of the UConn School of Medicine, and Kenneth Jacobson from the National Institutes of Health to develop more soluble and potent novel P2X4R inhibitors.

This technology would have a major impact as there is currently no effective drug to target stroke damage on the market aside from a few narrowly applicable treatment to dissolve blood clot or device to remove it.

From a drug perspective, we don't have anything for neuroprotection. It's a very big and open market."

Rajkumar Verma, Study Author and Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine, University of Connecticut

With this successful demonstration of their proof of concept, the researchers will continue to refine this method to find the most effective inhibitors. The team is currently working with UConn Technology Commercialization Services to license this innovation. For more information, contact Ana Fidantsef, Ph.D.

Source:

Journal reference:

Srivastavaa, P., et al. (2020) Neuroprotective and neuro-rehabilitative effects of acute purinergic receptor P2X4 (P2X4R) blockade after ischemic stroke. Experimental Neurology. doi.org/10.1016/j.expneurol.2020.113308.

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Inhibition of key receptor implicated in post-stroke damage and recovery - News-Medical.Net

Neuroscience

International Project to Delve Into the Mysteries of Brain Connections – UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

AUSTIN, Texas Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin will lead an ambitious new project with 10 other U.S. institutions that has significant implications for understanding human brain health.

With support from the Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NeuroNex) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team will examine newly discovered complexities related to synapses the tiny structures that form trillions of connections between nerve cells in the brain and allow us to think, sense, learn, act and remember. The partnership, which includes scientists in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada, hopes to explore new ways to define what determines the strength of synapses and what alters their strength.

Traditionally, synapses have been treated as on or off switches essentially, 1-bit machines but this assumption is wrong, said Kristen Harris,a professor in the UT Department of Neuroscience and the Center for Learning and Memory, who will lead the project. Our team discovered that the information content stored in the size of a synapse can be much higher, already found to be greater than 4 bits in some brain regions. What this outcome means is that synapses are less like light switches and more like dimmer switches that can dial in the desired strength depending on need or mood.

Because new research has found synapses to be far more varied and nuanced than neuroscientists believed five years ago, the new project will examine many aspects of whats known as synaptic weight (or strength). The international scientific team will explore variation among synapses, from the level of molecules to the level of circuits, to determine what differences among them mean for our basic understanding of the brain.

Using multidisciplinary approaches, cutting-edge imaging technologies and cyber resources, the research team will generate data to predict how specific neural circuits form and function. Because recent research has uncovered the important role of differences in synaptic strength, the new project will explore how factors such as size, connectivity, volume, cellular resources and protein composition help shape these nanometer-sized structures and the effects that these differences have in the brain.

Theres still so much we dont know about how the brain works, and one of the keys to unlocking those mysteries is finding out more about specific neural circuits, said NSF NeuroNex Program Director Floh Thiels. This requires bringing together researchers from fields including chemistry, biology and computer science and engineering, and applying the latest analysis techniques to the data they produce. This has been a goal for neuroscientists for years, and what we will see from this network of researchers is a new chapter of international collaboration and coordination.

To compare and map synaptic weights the team is developing a new form of electron microscopy called tomoSEM (tomographic scanning electron microscopy), which will be able to capture information in high resolution and across large field sizes as necessary for the research. Once completed in the Harris lab, tomoSEM will be implemented and tested across labs in this NeuroNex network, and ultimately it will be standardized for general use. The images and tools will be shared with the scientific community on a public website in collaboration with UTs Texas Advanced Computing Center(TACC).

NSF has awarded more than $50 million over five years to four interdisciplinary teams, including $17.5 million for the U.S. component of the team Harris is leading. Collaborators are Alice Ting at Stanford University; Mark Ellisman at the University of California, San Diego; Erik Jorgenson and Bryan Jones the University of Utah; Clay Reid at the Allen Institute for Brain Science; Davi Bock at the University of Vermont; Narayanan Kasthuri at the University of Chicago; Linnaea Ostroff at the University of Connecticut at Storrs; Terrence Sejnowski and Uri Manor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Joshua Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University; and James Carson at TACC. In addition, Viren Jain at Google (US) will participate in this project.

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International Project to Delve Into the Mysteries of Brain Connections - UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

Neuroscience

Neuroscience antibodies and assays Market is Booming Worldwide to Show Significant Growth by 2020-2026 – Owned

Neuroscience antibodies and assays Market is growing at a High CAGR during the forecast period 2020-2026. The increasing interest of the individuals in this industry is that the major reason for the expansion of this market.

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1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.5 Market by Application1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered

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3 Market Share by Key Players3.1 Neuroscience antibodies and assays Market Size by Manufacturers3.2 Neuroscience antibodies and assays Key Players Head office and Area Served3.3 Key Players Neuroscience antibodies and assays Product/Solution/Service3.4 Date of Enter into Neuroscience antibodies and assays Market3.5 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion Plans

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Premium market insightsPremiummarketinsights.comis a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.

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Neuroscience antibodies and assays Market is Booming Worldwide to Show Significant Growth by 2020-2026 - Owned

Neuroscience

A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring – WIRED

As both a clinician and a scientist, Fox is particularly interested in using the network approach not only to better understand particular diseases, but also to treat them. He has spent years working to optimize brain-stimulation treatments for diseases like Parkinsons and depression. The two primary approaches to brain stimulationdeep brain stimulation (DBS), which involves surgically implanting wires directly into the brain, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive approach that involves passing a magnet over specific locations on the skullwere both available when Fox began his work in the first decade of the 2000s, but they were far from being perfected.

Both technologies are based on the idea that some neurological and psychiatric diseases are caused by abnormal brain activity, and stimulation may be able to correct them. In Parkinsons, stimulating an area called the basal ganglia relieves symptoms like tremor, and a closely related technology called responsive neurostimulation can quell epileptic seizures by targeting where they originate. As an electrical engineer, the idea that you could stick electrodes in someones brain, turn them on, and have almost miracle-like effects on Parkinsons symptomsor hold an electromagnet over somebodys brain and fix their depressionit almost seemed like science fiction, he says.

But decades of research have proven that, for most other diseases, such regions dont exist. And even if they did, stimulation to a specific spot is not going to remain confined to that spot, because an activated brain region will send out signals along white matter tracts, and those signals may in turn activate other regions. If you want to stimulate [a] particular area of the brain to quiet a seizure, your stimulation to that region doesnt stay in the regionit goes everywhere else, Bassett says.

Along with giving clinicians a better understanding of the consequences of brain stimulation, network neuroscience may also help scientists design better techniques. In particular, if scientists can determine the circuits that a highly invasive technique like deep brain stimulation is acting upon, they might be able to achieve similar results with a nonsurgical approach like TMS. Once your target is a circuit, you can target that circuit in different ways, Fox says. You could begin to test the therapeutic effect of the circuit noninvasively before you do something invasive. In particular, this approach could allow clinicians to access regions buried in the brain, like those targeted in DBS treatments for Parkinsons, through areas closer to the surface. If those regions are connected to more superficial regions, then perhaps, with this network understanding, you can figure out which region is connected in the best way to the target region so that TMS will be effective, Vrtes says.

And as scientists start thinking of brain diseases as the results of multiple regions acting in concert, as opposed to single regions, they can start trying to target the whole circuit at once. It might be that the best way to help a symptom that maps to a circuit is actually multiple electrodes, or multiple stimulation sites, Fox says.

Pharmacological treatments, which dominate psychiatric practice, dont only affect specific brain areas. Just like a painkiller will lessen pain throughout the body, so too will a psychiatric medication spread throughout the brain. Nevertheless, network neuroscience could still prove useful for optimizing drug regimens: It could help clinicians target their choice of drug to the individual, not the disease. If scientists better understand what makes each brain different, they may be able to leverage those differences to predict who will respond best to which drug.

For some people, drug X works, and for some other people, drug Y works, and you dont know until you try them both, Bassett says. And I feel like its medieval science. But hopefully, with an understanding of the individual differences in the brain, we will have a better lever on how to predict human responses to a particular interventionand then not have to have people go for a year through different kinds of medication before we find one that works for them.

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A Radical New Model of the Brain Illuminates Its Wiring - WIRED

Neuroscience

New treatment increases the speed of nerve regeneration for trauma patients – News-Medical.Net

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Aug 19 2020

A University of Alberta researcher has found a treatment that increases the speed of nerve regeneration by three to five times, leading to much better outcomes for trauma surgery patients.

We use the term 'time is muscle. If that regrowing nerve can't get to the muscle fast enough, you're not going to get a functional repair."

Christine Webber, associate professor in the U of A's anatomy division and a member of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute

Peripheral nerve injury occurs in about three per cent of trauma victims. The slow nature of nerve regeneration means that often muscles atrophy before the nerve has a chance to grow and reconnect.

That's where conditioning electrical stimulation (CES) comes in.

Webber and her collaborators--plastic surgery resident and former PhD student Jenna-Lynn Senger, and physical rehabilitation clinician Ming Chan--have examined CES in many previous publications. The process involves electrically stimulating a nerve at the fairly low rate of 20 hertz for one hour. A week after the CES treatment, nerve surgery is done, and the nerves grow back three to five times faster than if the surgery was done without CES.

In their latest work on CES, Webber's group examined animal models with foot drop, a common injury that affects patients' quality of life by impeding their ability to walk normally. Previously, the only treatments for foot drop were orthotics that affect a patient's gait, or surgery.

Webber's lab performed a distal nerve transfer in which a nerve near the damaged one was electrically stimulated, then a week later a branch of the nerve was cut and placed near the target of the non-functioning nerve. The newly transferred nerve would then be primed and ready to regrow, at a much faster rate, into the muscles that lift the foot.

CES can be a tool for faster nerve regrowth in any portion of the peripheral nervous system. Ming Chan, also a Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute member, has started a clinical trial in which CES is used before a nerve repair of the carpal tunnel.

Webber hopes to bring the information gained from examining nerve transfers in the leg--a difficult body part for nerve regrowth due to the vast area the nerve must cover--to clinical trials within the next year or two.

Source:

Journal reference:

Senger, J.B., et al. (2020) Conditioning Electrical Stimulation Accelerates Regeneration in Nerve Transfers. Annals of Neurology. doi.org/10.1002/ana.25796.

Original post:
New treatment increases the speed of nerve regeneration for trauma patients - News-Medical.Net

Neuroscience

UT leads new project to explore the mysteries of brain connections – News-Medical.net

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Aug 19 2020

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin will lead an ambitious new project with 10 other U.S. institutions and global partners that has significant implications for understanding human brain health.

With support from the Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NeuroNex) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team will examine newly discovered complexities related to synapses -- the tiny structures that form trillions of connections between nerve cells in the brain and allow us to think, sense, learn, act and remember. The partnership, which includes scientists in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada, hopes to explore new ways to define what determines the strength of synapses and what alters their strength.

Traditionally, synapses have been treated as on or off switches -- essentially, 1-bit machines -- but this assumption is wrong. Our team discovered that the information content stored in the size of a synapse can be much higher, already found to be greater than 4 bits in some brain regions. What this outcome means is that synapses are less like light switches and more like dimmer switches that can dial in the desired strength depending on need or mood."

Kristen Harris, professor in the UT Department of Neuroscience and the Center for Learning and Memory, project leader

Because new research has found synapses to be far more varied and nuanced than neuroscientists believed five years ago, the new project will examine many aspects of what's known as synaptic weight (or strength). The international scientific team will explore variation among synapses, from the level of molecules to the level of circuits, to determine what differences among them mean for our basic understanding of the brain.

Using multidisciplinary approaches, cutting-edge imaging technologies and cyber resources, the research team will generate data to predict how specific neural circuits form and function. Because recent research has uncovered the important role of differences in synaptic strength, the new project will explore how factors such as size, connectivity, volume, cellular resources and protein composition help shape these nanometer-sized structures and the effects that these differences have in the brain.

"There's still so much we don't know about how the brain works, and one of the keys to unlocking those mysteries is finding out more about specific neural circuits," said NSF NeuroNex Program Director Floh Thiels. "This requires bringing together researchers from fields including chemistry, biology and computer science and engineering, and applying the latest analysis techniques to the data they produce. This has been a goal for neuroscientists for years, and what we will see from this network of researchers is a new chapter of international collaboration and coordination."

To compare and map synaptic weights the team is developing a new form of electron microscopy called tomoSEM (tomographic scanning electron microscopy), which will be able to capture information in high resolution and across large field sizes as necessary for the research. Once completed in the Harris lab, tomoSEM will be implemented and tested across labs in this NeuroNex network, and ultimately it will be standardized for general use. The images and tools will be shared with the scientific community on a public website in collaboration with UT's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

NSF has awarded more than $50 million over five years to four interdisciplinary teams, including $17.5 million for the U.S. component of the team Harris is leading. Collaborators are Alice Ting at Stanford University; Mark Ellisman at the University of California, San Diego; Erik Jorgenson and Bryan Jones the University of Utah; Clay Reid at the Allen Institute for Brain Science; Davi Bock at the University of Vermont; Narayanan Kasthuri at the University of Chicago; Linnaea Ostroff at the University of Connecticut at Storrs; Terrence Sejnowski and Uri Manor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; Joshua Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University; and James Carson at TACC. In addition, Viren Jain at Google (US) will participate in this project.

Originally posted here:
UT leads new project to explore the mysteries of brain connections - News-Medical.net

Neuroscience

CWRU roboticist, neuroscientist to lead $8 million National Science Foundation project – Crain’s Cleveland Business

A pair of biorobotic pioneers at Case Western Reserve University will lead a five-year, $8 million National Science Foundation (NSF) project to further explore challenges scientists face in making more lifelike and responsive robots, according to a news release.

The project is part of a $50 million endeavor enlisting 70 researchers from four countries to investigate how brains work and interact with their environment. It is funded under NSF's Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience, or NeuroNex, a program that aims to establish international research networks building on existing global investments in neurotechnologies in an effort to understand the brain.

The CWRU project, "NeuroNex: Communication, Coordination, and Control in Neuromechanical Systems (C3NS)," will examine how the nervous system in animals coordinates and controls interactions with the environment, which remains a challenging research problem in neuroscience, according to the release.

Understanding animal movement is crucial for neuroscience because it has implicants for everything from eating to functioning, NSF NeuroNex program director Sridhar Raghavachari said in the release, adding that this is even more important in efforts to create a new generation of robots that can navigate difficult terrain. The C3NS project's multidisciplinary approach benefits neuroscience and robotics simultaneously, Raghavachari said in the release.

"People have been promising lifelike robots for decades and one of the reasons that we're not really there yet is really just the complexity of the world around us," said neuroscientist Hillel Chiel, a professor of biology, neurosciences and biomedical engineering in the College of Arts and Sciences, in a provided statement. "We are focused on creating autonomous devices capable of functioning in the real world, instead of redesigning the environment around them to allow them to move about."

Chiel and roboticist Roger Quinn, the Arthur P. Armington Professor of Engineering and director of the Biorobotics Complex at the Case School of Engineering, will lead the team, which also will include former CWRU researcher Vickie Webster-Wood of Carnegie Mellon, and collaborators from Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, Emory University, West Virginia University and Portland State University, the release stated. According to the NSF, international collaborators from the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom and the University of Cologne, the University of Jena and the University of Wrzburg in Germany are funded by their home governments.

"Most roboticists try to solve problems with optimization, or with basic design solutions," Quinn said in a provided statement. "But what I've wanted to know is 'How do animals solve these problems?' It's a different way of approaching the problem and there's an animal that has solved just about every engineering problem ever."

The group's submitted plan said the project could "lead to a better understanding of the diversity of life on Earth and may suggest general organizing principles for the nervous system," according to the release. The proposal also indicates the project could also help in the investigation of motor disorders that disrupt locomotion and balance (like Parkinson's) and in the development of neurally-controlled prostheses that can effectively process human neural inputs to more naturally and effectively grasp objects or walk smoothly, according to the release.

NeuroNex is a key part of NSF's participation in the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN Initiative, a collaboration across U.S. agencies to advance the understanding of the brain. The other three projects are based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the University of Texas, Austin, and Yale University.

"The most important questions in neuroscience are so complex they require large teams of researchers with complementary expertise," said Joanne Tornow, NSF assistant director for biological sciences, in a provided statement. "These awards will help us conquer those grand challenges and accelerate profound discoveries about how our brains work."

Link:
CWRU roboticist, neuroscientist to lead $8 million National Science Foundation project - Crain's Cleveland Business