OpenScope Project Reveals Secrets of the Brain – Neuroscience News


Summary: The OpenScope program is studying neural activity across four new projects, exploring topics such as the effects of psilocybin, motion perception, visual texture recognition, and subtle changes in appearance.

Using advanced imaging techniques on mice, researchers aim to understand how the brain processes these complex functions. The program provides global access to neuroscience research data. The findings could lead to advances in understanding and treating brain disorders.

Highlights:

  1. Psychedelic effects: Studying how psilocybin affects brain activity at the cellular level.
  2. Visual perception: Studying how the brain processes motion and texture recognition.
  3. Open science: OpenScope provides global access to cutting-edge neuroscience research data.

Source: Allen Institute

How do neurons react to magic mushrooms? What happens in the brain when we see movement or recognize the grain of a piece of wood? How does our brain detect subtle changes in our friends’ appearance over time?

The Allen Institute has launched four projects to study these questions through OpenScope, a shared neuroscience observatory. Just as astronomers use a few well-equipped observatories to study the universe, the OpenScope program allows neuroscientists around the world to propose and lead experiments on the Allen Brain Observatory pipeline.

This shows a brain.
In this OpenScope project, mice will be trained to distinguish textures while their neural activity is monitored in the visual cortex, linking neural responses to perception. Credit: Neuroscience News

All research is made freely available to anyone addressing open questions about neural activity in health and disease.

OpenScope, now in its sixth year, aims to “pave the way for a new model in neuroscience,” said Jérôme Lecoq, Ph.D., an associate researcher at the Allen Institute.

“Our platform improves data acquisition and sharing globally, while enabling individual labs to leverage it for their unique scientific pursuits,” said Lecoq, who co-leads OpenScope with Christof Koch.

“We strive to combine the best of both worlds: focused questions addressed by passionate teams and a sophisticated platform driven by experienced experimentalists. This is our vision for the future of neuroscience.”

Psychedelic Science

One of this year’s OpenScope projects will study how psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms,” alters brain activity at the cellular level. The compound, known to induce intense psychedelic experiences in humans, will be used to study the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive and perceptual alterations.

Using advanced recording techniques on mice, the scientists will observe how neurons communicate differently under the influence of psilocybin. They will also study how these changes might influence the brain’s ability to process and predict sensory information, which is key to understanding how perception is constructed.

“Our interest in these compounds goes beyond their potential clinical applications,” said Roberto de Filippo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin.

“We believe that uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying their effects can provide fundamental insights into the processes that govern perception, cognition and consciousness itself.”

This project is led by de Filippo; Torben Ott, Ph.D., of Humboldt University Berlin; and Dietmar Schmitz, Ph.D., of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

How the past subtly shapes our worldview

We often overlook the gradual changes in people we spend time with regularly, and only notice the differences when we look at an old photo or meet up with friends after a long time. Although these changes are almost imperceptible, our brains are constantly updating our memories with these details.

A 2024 OpenScope project aims to uncover the neural underpinnings of these updates. Using the Allen Brain Observatory platform, researchers will analyze brain activity in mice to understand how the brain’s visual system responds to changes over time.

Traditionally, neuroscientists thought that the visual system only processed incoming sensory information. But recent findings suggest that this system also stores visual memories and uses them to predict what we will see next.

“We want to understand how these memories influence the perception of real-world images and what role different areas of the brain play in this process,” said Yaniv Ziv, Ph.D., professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

“By understanding this, we want to find out whether these memories influence the flexibility or rigidity of our visual processing. For example, if we’ve seen something similar before, is our brain more or less likely to adapt to new visual information?”

This project is led by Ziv, Daniel Deitch, Alon Rubin, Ph.D., and Itay Talpir, both of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Deciphering how the brain perceives movement

How does the brain recognize objects that are moving around us? This OpenScope 2024 project aims to demystify this fundamental process by studying motion perception in the visual cortex of mice. While previous studies have identified brain regions that respond to different types of motion, the underlying neural circuits remain poorly understood.

This project will use microscopy to simultaneously observe the activity of many neurons over several weeks and in different parts of the visual cortex.

The team hopes to characterize the neural representation of movement across different brain regions and cell types and understand the specific circuits that support them. The insights gained from this work could have broader implications, because the same cell types and circuits are found throughout the cortex.

“If we can understand how these circuits process information in the visual system, there’s a good chance the same principles will apply throughout the brain,” said Julia Veit, Ph.D., professor at the University of Fribourg.

This project is led by Veit; Henning Sprekeler, Ph.D., of the Technical University of Berlin; and Yael Oran, Ph.D., of the University of Freiburg.

See the models around us

Our brains instantly recognize the myriad complex visual textures around us, from the intricate patterns on a butterfly’s wings to the grain of wood. But how does it achieve this remarkable feat of visual perception?

In this OpenScope project, mice will be trained to discriminate textures while their neural activity is monitored in the visual cortex, linking neural responses to perception.

The main goals are to determine how some textures are easily recognized while others pose a challenge, and to map how different brain regions interact to transform visual inputs into coherent representations that guide behavior.

These findings could reveal fundamental principles of how the brain extracts understanding from our pattern-rich visual world, the researchers said. But the scale and complexity of the research requires tools and resources beyond those of a typical laboratory.

“Using the Allen Brain Observatory will not only greatly increase the scope and reach of our project, but will also allow us to compare and contextualize all the other open science projects they have conducted over the last decade,” said Federico Bolaños, Ph.D., principal data scientist at the University of British Columbia.

“As has happened in other fields such as high-energy physics or astronomy, systems neuroscience research must move from individual laboratories to a larger, interconnected community in which we move forward together.”

This project is led by Bolaños; Timothy Murphy, Ph.D., of the University of British Columbia; and Javier Orlandi, Ph.D., of the University of Calgary.

Funding: The research described in this article was supported by funding from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under Grant Number U24NS113646. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH and its affiliated institutes.

About this news on open science and neuroscience research

Author: Pierre Kim
Source: Allen Institute
Contact: Peter Kim – Allen Institute
Picture: Image credited to Neuroscience News



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