The Salk Institute for Biological Studies requests support for renewal of the Core Grant for Vision Research. The Salk Center for the Neurobiology of Vision (CNV) includes 17 research laboratories, 14 at The Salk Institute and basic vision research groups at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). Twelve of these laboratories are currently funded through 13 active R01 grant awards from the National Eye Institute, 10 of them held at The Salk Institute. These vision science investigators come from several different departments, including the Vision Center, Computational Neurobiology, Molecular Neurobiology, Regulatory Biology and Systems Neurobiology Laboratories, and the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at The Salk Institute; Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at TSRI; and Psychology and Neurobiology at UCSD. Vision research within the CNV covers broad areas of interest, including visual system development and plasticity, understanding the mechanisms of the neural processing of visual stimuli, visual perception and their link to behaviors, and pathology. In addition to the Administrative Core, the NEI P30 Core Grant will continue support of four established resource and service cores that are critical for CNV research efforts: 1) Molecular Biology and Virology Core, 2) Non-Human Primate Facility Core, 3) Machine Shop Core, and 4) Advanced Computing Core. Each of the cores will have significant use by at least seven core investigators, with the Machine Shop and Advanced Computing Cores supporting all members of the Center. NEI support for the CNV Core Grant for Vision Research will continue to foster new interdisciplinary collaborations, supporting and enhancing the significant synergies that exist between these research efforts and providing the basis for the development of new projects and research programs. Core support will also provide significant leverage for The Salk Institute to stimulate outside philanthropy and to recruit trainees and other new investigators, further expanding vision research at the Institute and advancing the mission of the National Eye Institute.
Understanding the mechanisms by which visual inputs are processed from the retina to the brain and lead to changes in behavior as organisms interact with their environment provides a model system for understanding the central nervous system. Center programs include study of clinical disorders of visual perception such as Williams Syndrome and projects to develop prosthetics restoring vision to the blind.
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