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

了解大脑的下一步是揭示大脑不同区域是如何相互作用的。这项提议创造了一套跨学科的蛋白质和显微镜工具，可以光学捕捉并解释整个斑马鱼大脑的电影。这些大规模的记录将有助于了解不同大脑区域之间的关系，特别是在与特定神经障碍相关的快速神经活动模式期间。这项提议的技术和科学产品将产生培训材料，教育和激励下一代神经工程师。神经科学需要对大脑进行介观研究，以确定不同大脑区域之间的功能关系。这项提议创造了一系列荧光基因编码的电压传感器、光学显微镜和信号处理工具，以光学方式在整个斑马鱼大脑中同时提取目标神经种群的毫秒波形。这些记录将有助于描述快速、毫秒级的神经活动爆发的级联，这些活动通过构成神经障碍的多个大脑区域扩展。这项提议的更广泛的影响目标将把这些技术工具合并成教育和研究培训材料，针对STEM管道中的不同学生。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.