Matching molecules, cells and behaviour to understand brain function and disorder

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Brains are complex organs whose overall structure and functioning resembles that of a small town. The brain's building blocks are specialized cells called neurons arranged in discrete circuits. We can think of neurons as individual buildings, and circuits as neighbourhoods. Neurons are themselves varied and complex, and made up of various compartments, called axons and dendrites - different rooms in the building, to continue the analogy. These dendrites and axons are tasked with the key role of forming functional connections with their next-door neurons, thus forming a circuit. As it is not possible to understand how a town functions without having a good understanding of how it is built and interconnected, and which role each neighbourhood and building serves (e.g. town centre with shops and city hall, residential areas with houses, schools and supermarkets), we need similar multi-level understanding of circuits, neurons and their compartments to understand how brains work - or how it misfires causing disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, anxiety. In order to achieve this multi-level analytical approach, we will use rodents as animal models and build an experimental apparatus capable of simultaneously measuring structure, function and connectivity of neurons and circuits, and we will match these small-scale measures with large-scale, all brain activity and overall animal behaviour. By integrating these town-to-room approaches, we thus aim to provide a multi-level synthesis of how a defined brain circuits and their constituent cells function in synergy to control behaviour, or are altered in pathological states.