Computational approaches to neuroscience research

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Modern neuroscience research aims to increase our understanding of the biological processes going on inside brains and nerve cells. By doing so, we learn how brains control all aspects of behaviour, and we may one day be able to explain the physical basis for the most complex aspects of humanity such as consciousness. Understanding brain function is also crucial to the development of treatments for neurological disorders or damage. To tackle such difficult problems, neuroscience research draws on a huge range of experimental approaches, ranging from measurements of behaviour, through recordings of the electrical activity of individual nerve cells, to the modelling of sub microscopic processes that govern how molecules in nerve cell membranes change their shape in response to chemical or electrical signals. Increasingly, several of these techniques must be used in parallel to understand the functioning of 'the system' as a whole. Work in my laboratory addresses questions relating to the control of aimed limb movements. For example, how do sensory nerve cells signal a touch on the body surface? How do they then pass this information to other nerve cells that transform it into a pattern of activity that controls sets of limb muscles to produce a scratching movement aimed at the location of the touch? We film such movements and measure the movements very precisely, while recording and manipulating the electrical signalling of individual nerve cells to investigate their roles in the control system. This work is carried out in an insect, the locust, but the principles of organisation that we uncover can be related to brain function of other animals, including humans. In our most recent work we are setting out to develop new techniques to record and analyse the activity of not only single nerve cells, but groups of cells acting together. These multielectrode array recording techniques yield very complex signals that require considerable computational expertise to analyse. Part of our work, carried out with leading experts in signal processing, is to develop such analysis techniques, which will also be used for the analysis of recordings made from the brains of human patients during surgery. My expertise is in making recordings from nerve cells, but to take our collaborative work forward I now need to learn a new suite of techniques to process the new types of data that we will be gathering. The main purpose of this Fellowship is provide me with such training. I will attend courses and undertake hands-on training in the relevant techniques, some in the labs of my collaborators in Leicester and Germany. I will learn the use of specific software, but also the underlying principles of analysis. During the course of the Fellowship I will apply these new techniques to our data and attempt to answer some challenging questions about the control of aimed limb movements. I will also have the time to publish the results of a great deal of our work carried out over the last few years. This intensive re-training and research requires that a concentrated and extended period of time is devoted to it. The Fellowship will provide this opportunity, and will be matched by a commitment from my University to free me of remaining duties for the same period. In the end I will be in a much stronger position to continue to develop our research in new directions, and to train young researchers and students who will go on to strengthen the UK's position as a leading country for both basic and biomedical neuroscience research.