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A consortium of five WIBR scientists together with collaborators at Oxford and the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, has been awarded £4M by the Wellcome Trust to study neural circuits in the mammalian brain ("Functional neuromics of the cerebral cortex").
The aim is to record the activity of cells in the cerebral cortex by two-photon calcium imaging in mice while they are awake and behaving normally, to identify all the participating cells using newly-developed methods of single-cell RNA sequencing in situ and to describe the circuit properties mathematically. This will allow a fuller understanding of how individual cells contribute to the overall pattern of circuit activity, how this allows the brain to perform computations and how circuit function might be perturbed during neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases (e.g. Alzheimer's, schizophrenia).
The bid to Wellcome was led by computational neuroscientist Kenneth Harris (NPP/IoN) who, together with his close colleague and co-applicant Matteo Carandini (IoO), will be moving to the WIBR later this year, helped by a refurbishment grant from the Royal Society/ Wolfson Foundation.
The other co-applicants are:
- Professor Michael Hausser (WIBR)
- Dr Nicoletta Kessaris (WIBR)
- Professor William Richardson (WIBR)
- Dr Sten Linnarsson (Karolinska)
- Professor Mats Nilsson (Karolinska)
- Dr Jens Hjerling-Leffler (Karolinska)
- Professor Peter Somogyi (Oxford University)