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SUMMARY:Connectomics of cerebral cortex: multiscale studies of cell types\
 , circuits\, and projections
DTSTART:20181130T143000
DTEND:20181130T160000
DTSTAMP:20260415T005232Z
UID:dff7a28821de71b376df96c80cb25951947b73a72294ab43ec73f938
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Clay Reid is Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for B
 rain Science\, where he started a department in 2012 to study how informat
 ion is encoded and processed in neural networks of the visual system. Prio
 r to joining the Allen Institute\, Reid was Professor of Neurobiology at H
 arvard Medical School. Throughout his career\, he has used a combination o
 f imaging and anatomical approaches to investigate how the structure of ne
 ural connections relates to the functional of cortical circuits. He has he
 lped to pioneer new methods for simultaneously recording increasingly larg
 e ensembles of neurons to study information processing. More recently\, he
  has developed methods to analyze connections in these ensembles using lar
 ge-scale anatomical reconstructions with electron microscopy.\nOver the pa
 st decade\, new tools have emerged for studying the structure of networks 
 in the brain\, a field now known as connectomics. Connectomes can be stud
 ied at different scales\, from the synaptic connections between individual
  neurons—microscale connectomics—to brain-wide maps of neuronal projec
 tions between areas: macroscale connectomics. Microscale connectomics is t
 ypically performed with serial-section electron microscopy\, a technique t
 hat creates volumetric images of synaptic circuits with resolution on the 
 scale of ~10 nanometers. Our group is finishing data collection on an extr
 emely large data set\, encompassing a local circuit of the cerebral cortex
 \, with ~100\,000 neurons and 109interconnections. I’ll discuss the tech
 nical challenges in creating this petascale data set\, using transmission 
 electron microscopy to image 25\,000 serial sections of brain tissue. Init
 ial analysis of smaller data sets shows that microscale connectomics with 
 dense segmentation (performed by our collaborators at Princeton) is a powe
 rful tool for analyzing cortical cell types and their connection onto dist
 inct targets within the local circuit.\n \nI will also discuss using lig
 ht microscopy to capture macroscale connectomes of large brains\, includin
 g the human. This was previously unrealistic because data sizes would be
  intractable. With the tools developed for microscale connectomics—from 
 data acquisition through computational analysis—a macroscale connectomic
 s that traces individual axons throughout the brain is now a possibility.
LOCATION:SV 1717 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%201717
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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