This NeuroNex Technology Hub, based at Stanford and the Salk Institute in California, will profoundly advance the understanding of the brain by developing technologies to study the brain's structure and function. The investigators will develop new approaches to understand how the individual components that make up the nervous system operate during behavior, and indeed cause behavior. The team will merge principles from genetics, physics, optics, engineering, and biology, to build and disseminate methodology, instrumentation, and analytics that enable targeting and control of individual kinds of brain cells, and the technology developed will be taught via hands-on training available to the scientific community. The outcome will be a broadly-applicable platform for discovering how neural circuit activity gives rise to complex cognitions and behaviors in the brain, which is essential to understand how the nervous stem fails to operate well in neurological and psychiatric diseases. The structure of the NeuroNex Training Core is designed to drive the participation of investigators across the spectrum of background and demography, including junior investigators and students as well as women and other underrepresented groups in STEM.
Current understanding of brain function at the cellular network level is limited by the lack of integrative tools that (in the same individual organism) can be used for molecularly defining neural circuit components, for tracing local and global wiring of those same circuit components, and for observing and controlling activity in those same circuit components during precisely controlled and quantified behaviors. This integration, or "datastream linking", will fundamentally advance knowledge but is an enormous practical and intellectual challenge. This NeuroNex Technology Hub will 1) address this challenge with molecular, genetic and optical tools while also developing computational methods to discover the underlying natural and causal structural and dynamical motifs; 2) do so in a vertically-linked fashion so that all technologies built are mutually compatible in the same nervous system at the same time; 3) do so in a horizontally-linked fashion, so that the technologies built are suitable for primate rat, mouse, fly, and diverse fish species; 4) engage in outreach, training, and dissemination, open for broadest impact to the entire NSF community throughout the program. This teaching will leverage our current state-of-the-art methods and educational infrastructure, and will advance alongside the technology development and integration.
