A National Resource for Postmortem Brain Research

描述（由申请人提供）：哈佛脑组织资源中心（HBTRC）是一个国家资源，为神经科学界获取、处理、储存和分发高质量的死后脑组织。HBTRC从患有各种运动障碍（亨廷顿舞蹈病和帕金森病）、痴呆症（阿尔茨海默病、额颞叶痴呆）、严重精神病（精神分裂症和双相情感障碍）和自闭症的个体中收集大脑。其功能的一个关键方面涉及70个正常控制的获得，代表了广泛的年龄范围。在目前的供资期内，卫生与健康委员会继续保持其核心价值，即保持其运作的质量和效率。每年，HBTRC收集大约275-300个大脑，并将数千个组织样本分发给美国和国外的研究人员。由于这一努力，HBTRC为神经科学家提供了由年龄、PMI、性别和半球匹配的con和病变大脑组成的特征明确的队列。由于我们几乎所有的病例都是通过社区转诊获得的，因此将收容、缺乏和药物滥用的潜在混淆效应降至最低。为了方便大脑的捐赠和处理，HBTRC有一个网站，上面有所有必要的表格，包括a)捐赠家庭的知情同意书，b)参与移除的病理学家或参与者处理大脑的说明，以及c)研究人员寻找研究组织的申请表。HBTRC还有一个用户互动数据库，以便从“脑库”接收组织的研究人员可以获得关键信息，如人口统计和神经病理学报告，以及大体解剖图像和组织学切片；为了提高我们组织的实用性，HBTRC对每种疾病感兴趣的关键区域进行基因表达谱分析，并将这些数据“存储”在国家大脑数据库（NBD）中，这是一个公共领域存储库，从HBTRC接收组织的研究人员可以从中下载这些原始数据。反过来，这些研究人员被鼓励将他们的发现“存入”NBD，以便研究相同疾病的同事可以将其用于各自的研究。在下一个资助期内，HBTRC将继续发挥其重要的国家资源作用，为神经科学界提供具有良好特征的高质量组织。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (HBTRC) is a national resource for the acquisition, processing, storage and distribution of high quality postmortem (PM) brain tissue to the neuroscience community. The HBTRC collects brains from individuals with a variety of movement disorders (Huntington's chorea and Parkinson's disease), dementias (Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementias), major psychoses (schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) and autism. A key aspect of its functioning involves the acquisition of 70 normal controls representing a broad range of ages. During the current funding period, the HBTRC has continued its core value of maintaining the quality and efficiency of its operation. Each year, the HBTRC collects approximately 275-300 brains and distributes thousands of tissue samples to investigators in the U.S. and abroad. As a result of this effort, the HBTRC provides neuroscientists with well-characterized cohorts consisting of CONs and diseased brains matched for age, PMI, gender and hemisphere. Since almost all of our cases are obtained through community-based referrals, the potential confounding effects of institutionalization, inanition and substance abuse are minimized. To facilitate the donation and processing of brains, the HBTRC has a website with all the necessary forms including a) the Informed Consent for the donor families, b) instructions for handling brains by pathologists or dieners involved in removal, and c) application forms for investigators seeking tissue for their research. The HBTRC also has a User-Interactive Database, so that investigators who receive tissue from the "brain bank" can obtain critical information, such as demographics and neuropathology reports, as well as images of gross dissections and histological slides; To enhance the utility of our tissue, the HBTRC performs gene expression profiling on key regions of interest for each disorder and "deposits" this data in the National Brain Databank (NBD), a public domain repository from which investigators receiving tissue from the HBTRC can download this raw data. In turn, these investigators are encouraged to "deposit" their findings in the NBD so that colleagues studying the same disorder can use them for their respective studies. Over the next funding period, the HBTRC will continue its role as a vital national resource for the distribution of well-characterized, high quality tissue to the neuroscience community.