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：大脑皮层负责我们的心理功能，如感知、认知和行动。尽管在发现单细胞和分子水平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是如何工作的。问题的本质在于理解数十亿个神经元如何通过数万亿个连接来协调它们的活动以产生我们的心智能力。我们还远远无法同时测量无数皮质细胞的活动并组装它们的物理接线图（连接组）。然而，如果存在控制这种复杂性的基本原则和规则，那么发现这些原则为理解皮层如何运作提供了一个明显的策略。事实上，人们假设皮层是由基本信息处理模块组成的。近一个世纪以来，解剖学家观察到皮质微结构具有显着的规律性：源自共同祖细胞并具有突触连接倾向的细胞串排列成与皮质表面正交的小柱。这些微柱被假设为皮质电路的基本功能单元。如果人们能够理解它们的组织原理，那么理解皮层如何工作的任务就会大大简化。发现这些基本模块的功能类似于发现基因，最终导致了 20 世纪的分子革命。到目前为止，由于技术限制，这些结构还无法进行详细研究。为了了解微柱的功能，必须同时监测体内所有构成神经元的活动。我们的目标是克服这些技术挑战并开发体内方法来研究整个微管。我们建议开发基于 3D 随机访问的体内显微镜