CAREER: Fast optical voltage imaging for detailing bursts of neural activity

了解大脑的下一步是揭示大脑的不同区域是如何相互作用的。这个提议创造了一套跨学科的蛋白质和显微镜工具，以光学方式捕获并解释整个斑马鱼大脑的影像。这些大规模的记录将有助于理解不同大脑区域之间的关系，特别是在与特定神经疾病相关的快速神经活动模式期间。这项提议的科技产品将产生教育和激励下一代神经工程师的培训材料。神经科学需要对大脑进行介观研究，以确定大脑不同区域之间的功能关系。该提案创建了一系列荧光基因编码电压传感器、光学显微镜和信号处理工具，以光学方式同时提取整个斑马鱼大脑中目标神经群的毫秒波形。这些记录将有助于描述神经活动在多个大脑区域扩展的快速级联，毫秒时间尺度的爆发是神经紊乱的基础。该提案的更广泛影响目标是将这些技术工具纳入针对STEM管道中各种学生的教育和研究培训材料。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The next step toward understanding the brain is to reveal how the different regions of the brain interact. This proposal creates an interdisciplinary set of protein and microscopy tools that optically captures and then interprets movies of the entire zebrafish brain. These large-scale recordings will help understand the relationship between different brain regions, especially during fast neural activity patterns associated with specific neural disorders. The technological and scientific products of this proposal will result in training materials that educate and inspire the next generation of neural engineers.Neuroscience requires a mesoscopic study of the brain to define the functional relationships between different brain regions. This proposal creates a series of fluorescent genetically encoded voltage sensors, optical microscopes, and signal processing tools to optically extract the millisecond waveforms of targeted neural populations simultaneously over the entire zebrafish brain. These recordings will help characterize the cascade of fast, millisecond timescale bursts of neural activity expanding through multiple brain regions that underlie neural disorders. The broader impact goals of this proposal will fold these technological tools into educational and research training materials targeted to a diverse array of students in the STEM pipeline.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.