The University of Vermont is launching a national observatory to help scientists better understand brains and nervous systems.
It’s part of a five-year, $19 million National Science Foundation project UVM is partnering on with the University of California San Diego, officials announced Thursday.
The observatory will bring together advanced imaging, artificial intelligence and powerful computing networks to allow researchers to more closely explore tiny biological structures — from neurons in mouse brains, to cells in shark eyes and microscopic parasites — and get a better sense of how living things function. The hope is that findings could eventually improve human health.
"It's an amazing galaxy inside your skull that we're starting to have access to."Davi Bock, University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine
Neuroscientist Davi Bock, of UVM’s Larner College of Medicine, is leading the project. For the past two decades, he’s been working in the field of “connectomics,” the mapping of connections in the nervous system.
“The main thing people should know is that they have about 100 billion neurons inside their skulls, and each neuron connects to thousands of others, and somehow, them all working together gives rise to their consciousness and their ability to learn and remember and behave,” Bock said. “We are looking at how that works the best we can, and we're still far away from understanding, but it's an amazing galaxy inside your skull that we're starting to have access to.”
Nearly two years ago, Bock and a team of international scientists published the first complete wiring diagram of an adult animal brain. The team used high-powered electron microscopes to take millions of images of a fruit fly’s brain, and then used artificial intelligence to sift through that massive amount of data and compile a 3-D model. The diagram successfully mapped all 130,000 neurons and millions of synaptic nerve connections inside that brain.
Now, Bock and his team hope to expand this technology and use the observatory as a shared national resource that will broaden the range of questions and the community of scientists that can investigate them.
“You could look at the detail of how the lung inflates or collapses,” he said. “You could look at immune cells migrating throughout the body, and you could see the details of the structure of all these processes using this technology."
The research led by Bock is positioning UVM at the forefront of brain science and artificial intelligence research, while also providing an economic boon to the state, said Richard Page, dean of the Larner College of Medicine and chief medical affairs officer at UVM.
“We can have a national center. We can manage this data. We can study the data and learn important lessons from this information,” he said. “The next step is to scale this even further, and to become an even more important laboratory in service of everyone in the United States, supported by the National Science Foundation as well as other partners.”
Bock has four pilot projects lined up to test the observatory’s ability to handle different organisms, sample sizes and scientific needs.
One will examine eye cells in animal species to investigate how visual systems fare in different environments — for example, how a shark navigates clear and murky waters. Another will look at single-celled organisms called protists.
Learning more about how various living things work could lead to medical advancements and other benefits for humans, Page said.
“If someone has multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's or other brain disorders, by better understanding of the connectome and the biology, we could potentially develop better understanding of what's going wrong and how we might address that to improve human health,” he said.
