Dissecting the structure and function of vertebrate sensorimotor neural circuits using larval zebrafish

对我们的日常生活至关重要的是使用感官信息来计划和产生目标定向动作的能力。这些行为包括基本的任务，比如伸手拿东西或走上楼梯。尽管这些行为相对简单，但控制它们的所谓“感觉运动神经回路”却有着惊人的复杂性。确定构成感觉和运动基础的这些回路的结构和功能，对于理解大脑如何产生行为至关重要。神经学家在解开电路功能时面临的一些挑战是哺乳动物大脑中神经元的绝对数量及其令人难以置信的多样性。此外，大脑的规模和不透明阻碍了我们彻底记录行为过程中神经元活动的能力。分子生物学、显微技术和计算机技术的最新进展使人们有可能开始克服其中一些实验障碍。这些进展为研究人员提供了一个前所未有的机会，可以对神经回路的运作方式做出根本性的发现。*我的实验室将采用综合和多学科的方法，以斑马鱼幼体为模型来了解感觉运动回路是如何工作的。斑马鱼幼体由于其无与伦比的实验方法组合，特别是全面监测和操纵整个大脑活动的独有能力，已经成为研究神经回路的一个极其强大的系统。我们将利用这些方法来确定鱼中的电路如何使用视觉信息来控制两种目标导向的行为，即捕获猎物和躲避捕食者。具体地说，我们将专注于揭示鱼类的感觉运动回路是否在特定行为中起着专门的作用，或者更普遍地用于不同的行为。我们将在脊椎动物中高度保守的三个大脑结构中提出这个问题，这些结构代表了参与感觉处理、运动选择和运动产生的电路。从这项研究中获得的知识将对我们如何理解构成脊椎动物行为基础的大脑中的神经处理产生重大影响。感觉运动回路功能的发现也将对开发新的脑机接口产生影响，这种接口将允许只需考虑运动就可以毫不费力地控制假肢。最后，这项研究计划有可能提供洞察力，指导基于进化的感官处理和运动生产解决方案的强大硅胶技术的开发。**

Essential to our daily lives is the ability to use sensory information to plan and produce goal-directed movements. Such behaviours include basic tasks like reaching for an object or walking up a flight of stairs. Despite the relative simplicity of these behaviours, there is an astounding amount of complexity in the so-called “sensorimotor neural circuits” that control them. Determining the structure and function of these circuits that underlie sensation and movement is essential to understanding how the brain produces behaviour. Some of the challenges faced by neuroscientists in unraveling circuit function are the sheer number of neurons in the mammalian brain and their incredible diversity. Additionally, the scale and opacity of the brain hinders our ability to thoroughly record neuronal activity during behaviour. Recent technological advances in molecular biology, microscopy and computing have made it possible to begin to overcome some of these experimental hurdles. These advances present researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to make fundamental discoveries about how neural circuits operate.***My laboratory will take an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to understand how sensorimotor circuits function using the larval zebrafish as a model. The larval zebrafish has emerged as an extremely powerful system to study neural circuits due to its unparalleled combination of experimental approaches, notably the exclusive ability to comprehensively monitor and manipulate activity throughout the brain. We will utilize these approaches to determine how circuits in the fish use visual information to control two goal-directed behaviours, prey capture and predator avoidance. Specifically, we will focus on uncovering whether sensorimotor circuits in the fish have dedicated roles in a particular behaviour or are used more generally across different behaviours. We will ask this question in three brain structures that are highly conserved across vertebrates and represent circuitry involved in sensory processing, movement selection and movement production. Knowledge gained from this research will have a significant impact on how we understand the neural processing in the brain that underlies vertebrate behaviour. Discoveries in sensorimotor circuit function will also have implications for the development of new brain-machine interfaces that will allow for the effortless control of prosthetic limbs simply by thinking about movements. Lastly, this research program has the potential to provide insights that will guide the development of powerful in silico technologies rooted in evolution's solutions to sensory processing and movement production.**