FIBR: How Do Brains Regulate Simple Motor Actions to Generate Complex Behaviors?

现代生物学面临的巨大挑战之一是了解动物的大脑如何将简单的运动行为协调成复杂的行为。例如，一只苍蝇从桌子上跳下来，落在天花板上，这一动作需要一系列复杂的腿和翅膀运动，通过感官反馈迅速调整。大脑，即使是像苍蝇一样简单的大脑，是如何完美无缺地完成这些壮举的，我们仍然不得而知。这个项目将结合遗传学和工程学的进步，通过实验控制行为正常的动物大脑中单个神经元的活动，从而使科学家能够直接观察特定大脑回路的行为后果。这项多学科研究将包括三个组成部分。首先，研究人员将在单个神经元内设计离子通道，这些通道可以通过光脉冲打开和关闭，从而创建一个开关来打开和关闭脑细胞。其次，他们将对动物进行基因工程改造，使其拥有这些可控的神经元。最后，他们将使用复杂的电子设备，如虚拟现实飞行模拟器，来测量实验操作特定大脑回路导致的行为变化。这将使调查小组能够绘制和破译负责控制各种行为的大脑区域。这项研究将在果蝇上进行，果蝇是一种重要的实验室生物，广泛用于遗传和医学研究，对研究包括酗酒、衰老和肥胖在内的各种人类疾病至关重要。这项工作还将被纳入对苍蝇进行“逆向工程”的努力中，并将有关苍蝇的大脑、身体和行为的信息结合起来，创造出自主飞行的机器人。一项教育培训和推广计划将促进学生和年轻科学家在生物学、数学和工程学方面的广泛技能的发展，并有能力解决以前需要跨学科方法的棘手问题。该项目是由加州理工学院（Michael Dickinson）和加州大学伯克利分校（Isacoff）领导的合作项目。

One of the great challenges facing modern biology is understanding how the brains of animals coordinate simple motor acts into complex behaviors. For example, the act of a fly leaping from a table and landing on the ceiling requires an intricate sequence of leg and wing motion rapidly modified by sensory feedback. How brains, even those as simple as a fly's, flawlessly execute such feats remains unknown. This project will combine advances in genetics and engineering to experimentally control the activity of individual neurons within the brains of animals that are behaving normally, thus allowing scientists to directly observe the behavioral consequences of specific brain circuits. This multidisciplinary research will involve three components. First, researchers will engineer ion channels within individual neurons that can be opened and closed with pulses of light, creating a switch that turns brain cells on and off. Second, they will genetically engineer animals with these controllable neurons. Finally, they will use sophisticated electronic devices, such as virtual reality flight simulators, that measure changes in behavior resulting from the experimental manipulation of specific brain circuits. This will allow the investigative team to map and decipher brain regions responsible for the control of various behaviors. The research will be conducted on fruit flies, an important laboratory organism that is used in a wide range of genetic and medical research and is crucial to studying a wide variety of human diseases including alcoholism, senility and obesity. The work will also be incorporated into efforts to 'reverse engineer' flies and combine information about the brains, bodies and behavior of flies to create autonomous flying robots. An educational training and outreach program will foster the development of students and young scientists broadly skilled in biology, math and engineering and capable of approaching formerly intractable problems that require interdisciplinary approaches. This project is a collaboration led by California Institute of Technology (Michael Dickinson) and University of California-Berkeley (Isacoff).