Andreas Schaefer, Principal Group Leader of the Sensory Circuits and Neurotechnology Laboratory at the Crick, has received a Wellcome Discovery Award to chart the brain circuitry behind the sense of smell in mice.
Read more about Andreas's lab here.
Andreas will lead the new project, working with a team at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble.
A major challenge in neuroscience is to understand wiring diagrams of the brain: how all the brain cells connect in what is known as the connectome. Recent technological advances have allowed researchers to map smaller brains, starting with fruit fly larvae and then the adult fruit fly. However, the mouse brain is a huge leap in scale, with millions more neurons and therefore billions more connections to chart.
The new project will focus on mapping a critical brain region in the mouse, the olfactory system. The olfactory bulb receives inputs from the environment and then sends projections everywhere in the brain, so it’s a good example of a brain region that makes a lot of connections with other areas.
By correlating the activity of input and output neurons in the olfactory bulb with a map of their connections, the team aims to uncover the circuitry underlying how smells are represented and interpreted. This will allow them to understand how the olfactory bulb reformats sensory signals for processing elsewhere in the brain.
To begin answering these questions, Andreas’s team will first measure how cells in the mouse brain respond to odours. They will then combine this information with X-ray and electron microscopy imaging of the region, to understand how neurons in the olfactory bulb respond to different odours in the environment. The ESRF team will work in parallel to improve X-ray imaging methods, aiming to increase resolution to uncover more information.
Andreas said: “We’re excited to work in partnership with Alexandra Pacureanu and her team at the ESRF so that advancements in technology feed into our ambition to map the mouse olfactory system and understand where and how smells are processed. We hope that a comprehensive understanding of a key brain region will get us one step closer to mapping the entire mouse brain in years to come.
“This collaboration builds on several years of joint work between the Crick and ESRF teams, supported previously through a Physics of Life grant. Together, we’re aiming to establish X-ray connectomics as a transformative, scalable method for neuroscience.”
