NeuroNex Technology Hub: Integrated Circuit Cracking (ICC) with Linked Tools for Diverse Systems

这个位于斯坦福大学和加州索尔克研究所的NeuroNex技术中心将通过开发研究大脑结构和功能的技术，深刻地推进对大脑的理解。研究人员将开发新的方法来理解构成神经系统的各个组成部分在行为过程中是如何运作的，以及如何导致行为。该团队将融合遗传学、物理学、光学、工程学和生物学的原理，建立和传播方法、仪器和分析方法，以实现针对和控制单个类型的脑细胞，并且开发的技术将通过实践培训传授给科学界。结果将是一个广泛适用的平台，用于发现神经回路活动如何在大脑中产生复杂的认知和行为，这对于理解神经干如何在神经和精神疾病中无法正常运作至关重要。NeuroNex培训核心的结构旨在推动不同背景和人口统计学的研究人员的参与，包括初级研究人员和学生，以及女性和其他STEM中代表性不足的群体。目前在细胞网络水平上对大脑功能的理解受到缺乏整合工具的限制，这些工具（在同一个体生物体中）可用于分子定义神经回路组件，追踪相同回路组件的局部和全局布线，以及在精确控制和量化行为期间观察和控制相同回路组件的活动。这种集成，或“数据流链接”，将从根本上推动知识的发展，但这是一个巨大的实践和智力挑战。该NeuroNex技术中心将1)利用分子、遗传和光学工具解决这一挑战，同时开发计算方法来发现潜在的自然和因果结构和动态基元；2)以垂直连接的方式进行，以便所有构建的技术同时在同一神经系统中相互兼容；3)以水平连接的方式进行，使所建立的技术适用于灵长类大鼠、小鼠、苍蝇和各种鱼类；4)参与外展、培训和传播，在整个项目中对整个NSF社区产生最广泛的影响。这种教学将利用我们目前最先进的方法和教育基础设施，并将随着技术的发展和整合而推进。

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.