This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Understanding the precise wiring of neural circuits requires visualization and analysis of the fine ultrastructure of neural tissues. This includes nanoscale imaging of synapses and vesicles across large libraries of serial ultrathin sections. With the invention of several techniques to scale up collection of electron micrographs, processing and analyzing the large datasets now available requires substantial computational power. For example, reconstructing skeletons or areamaps of neural processes from these image datasets requires fine alignment of the ultrastructure from one image in a section library to the next. For normal desktop computers this can be a very slow task;supercomputing is required for faster alignment of our large image datasets. I intend to test the algorithms we currently use to determine how they can be modified to speed up alignments. I also intend to begin experimenting with 3-D rendering of analyzed circuits.
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