The Human Brain Project (Neuroinformatics): Phase I & Phase II

神经科学中的一个重大挑战是在细胞和网络层面上理解信息处理的生物学基础。继续取得进展的一个主要技术障碍是缺乏足够的信息学和分析工具来探索复杂神经电路的结构组织，发现和理解神经集合的新特性，提出关于神经计算的定量假设，以及对这些假设进行实验测试。这些科学家开发了一个原型数据库系统，提供了许多所需的功能，并使用该软件系统来研究神经编码的潜在机制。这里提出的工作的总体目标是扩展这一原型系统的能力和通用用途，将数据库与几个额外的工具相连接，用于结构和时间序列数据的分析，并使远程合作者之间能够更有效地共享数据。核心信息学和神经科学研究将由蒙大拿州立大学的一组研究人员进行。还与其他几个研究机构的研究人员建立了合作关系，以确保该系统与其他数据收集和分析工具的互操作性，并促进该系统的测试和改进。PI和合作研究人员都在细胞和网络水平上研究各种准备工作中感觉处理的动态方面，包括板球、猫和猴子的视觉系统。研究人员都分享了以下神经科学的总体研究目标：a)了解神经系综中时空活动模式与它们所传达的信息之间的关系，b)了解一个处理阶段的时空模式如何在下一个处理阶段被解码，c)了解如何对解码后的形态、突触连通性和系综中神经元的内在生物物理特征进行计算。这里开发的软件工具将应用于这些正在进行的研究，使这些研究项目的广度、深度、严谨性和进度都有实质性的提高。这项神经科学研究将反过来为信息学工具的改进、推广和推广提供严格的基础。

A grand challenge in neuroscience is to understand the biological basis of information processing at the cellular and network levels. One major technology barrier to continuing progress is the lack of adequate informatics and analysis tools to enable exploration of the structural organization of complex neural circuits, the discovery and understanding of emergent properties of neural ensembles, the formulation of quantitative hypotheses about neural computation, and the testing of those hypotheses experimentally. These scientists have developed a prototype database system that provides many of the needed capabilities, and have used this software system to study mechanisms underlying neural encoding. The general goals of the work proposed here are to extend the capabilities and general utility of this prototype system, to interface the database with several additional tools for the analysis of structural and time-series data, and to enable more effective data sharing between remote collaborators. The core informatics and neuroscience research will be carried out by a group of researchers at Montana State University. Collaborations have also been established with researchers at several other research institutions, to insure interoperability of this system with other data collections and analysis tools and to facilitate the testing and refinement of this system. The PI and co-investigators all study dynamic aspects of sensory processing at the cellular and network levels in a variety of preparations, including the cricket, cat, and monkey visual systems. The researchers all share the following general neuroscience research aims: a) to understand the relationships between spatio-temporal activity patterns in neural ensembles and the information they convey, b) to understand how the spatio-temporal patterns at one processing stage are decoded at the next processing stage, c) to understand how computations are carried out on that decoded morphology, synaptic connectivity, and intrinsic biophysical characteristics of the neurons in the ensembles. The software tools developed here will be applied to these ongoing studies, enabling a substantial increase in the breadth, depth, rigor, and rate of progress of those research projects. That neuroscience research will, in turn, provide a rigorous basis for the refinement, generalization and extension of the informatics tools.