Dissecting the Fabric of the Cerebral Cortex

解剖大脑皮层的结构

基本信息

批准号：
8331581
负责人：
Andreas Tolias
金额：
$ 78.25万
依托单位：
BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2011
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2011-09-30 至 2016-07-31
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION Abstract: The cerebral cortex houses our mental functions like perception, cognition and action. Despite major advances in discovering the properties of single cells and molecular-level processes, we still do not know how the cortex works at the circuit level. The essence of the problem lies in understanding how the billions of neurons communicating through trillions of connections orchestrate their activities to give rise to our mental faculties. We are far from being able to simultaneously measure the activity of all the myriads of cortical cells and assemble their physical wiring diagram (connectome). However, if there are underlying principles and rules that govern this complexity, discovering these principles provides an obvious strategy for understanding how the cortex functions. Indeed, it has been hypothesized that the cortex is composed of elementary information processing modules. For almost a century anatomists have observed remarkable regularity in the cortical microarchitecture: strings of cells derived from a common progenitor cell and having a propensity of being synaptically connected are arranged to form small columns orthogonal to the cortical surface. These microcolumns are hypothesized to be the elementary functional units of cortical circuitry. If one were able to understand their organizing principles, the task of understanding how the cortex works would be simplified immensely. Discovering the function of these elementary modules would be analogous to the discovery of the gene, which ultimately led to the molecular revolution of the 20th century. So far, these structures could not be studied in detail due to technical limitations. To understand the function of a microcolumn, it is imperative to simultaneously monitor the activity of all its constituting neurons in vivo. It is our goal to overcome these technical challenges and develop in-vivo methods to study an entire microlumn. We propose to develop in vivo microscopy based on 3D random-access

描述抽象的：大脑皮层具有我们的心理功能，例如感知，认知和行动。尽管在发现单细胞和分子级过程的特性方面取得了重大进展，但我们仍然不知道皮层在电路水平上的工作原理。问题的本质在于理解数十亿个通过数万亿个联系进行交流的神经元如何策划他们的活动，从而引起我们的心理能力。我们远非能够同时测量所有无数皮层细胞的活性并组装它们的物理接线图（Connectome）。但是，如果存在基本的原则和规则来控制这种复杂性，则发现这些原理为理解皮质的功能提供了一个明显的策略。确实，已经假设皮层由基本信息处理模块组成。在近一个世纪的解剖学家中，在皮质微体系结构中观察到了显着的规律性：源自公共祖细胞和具有突触连接的倾向的细胞串被安排，以形成与皮质表面正交的小柱。这些微柱被认为是皮质回路的基本功能单元。如果一个人能够理解他们的组织原则，那么了解皮质的工作原理的任务将大大简化。发现这些基本模块的功能将类似于发现基因的发现，该基因最终导致了20世纪的分子革命。到目前为止，由于技术限制，无法详细研究这些结构。要了解微柱的功能，必须同时监测其在体内所有构成神经元的活性。我们的目标是克服这些技术挑战并开发研究整个microlumn的体内方法。我们建议基于3D随机访问开发体内显微镜