Collaborative Research: Brain Metabolic Plasticity and Agression

生物学的一个关键挑战是理解大脑功能和行为之间的联系。大脑功能动力学的知识对于理解经验如何塑造大脑尤为重要。这个项目结合了最先进的技术来测量和数学建模大脑代谢活动，使用蜜蜂作为模型系统和攻击作为焦点行为。实验将确定实验诱导的脑代谢变化是否会引起攻击行为的变化，这是基于先前收集的相关数据所期望的。额外的实验将确定大脑的哪些部分与代谢活动的攻击性相关的变化。这些新信息将用于建立蜜蜂大脑代谢网络的综合模型，然后通过实验工作进行验证。该合作项目将为本科生、研究生和博士后提供综合培训，研究团队成员将在退休人员和K-12设置的各种场所公开介绍该项目获得的关于大脑功能的新见解。伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校的基因组生物学研究所（IGB）将是存储和备份项目数据的设施，其中主要包括基于RNA生物信息学序列和代谢组学数据集。

A key challenge in biology is to understand the link between brain function and behavior. Knowledge of brain functional dynamics is especially important for understanding how experience shapes the brain. This project couples state-of-the-art techniques to measure and mathematically model brain metabolic activity, using the honey bee as a model system and aggression as the focal behavior. Experiments will determine whether experimentally induced changes in brain metabolism cause changes in aggression, which is what is expected based on previously collected correlative data. Additional experiments will determine in which parts of the brain are the aggression-related changes in metabolic activity. This new information will then be used to build a comprehensive model of the bee brain's metabolic network, which will then be validated with experimental work. This collaborative project will provide integrative training for undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates, and members of the research team will give public presentations on the new insights into brain function gained by this project in a variety of venues for retired people and in K-12 settings. The Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be the facility to store and back up project data, which include mainly RNA bioinformatic sequence-based and metabolomic datasets.