University of California Irvine: UCI is key member of multi-institutional, $126 million NIH brain mapping project
The University of California, Irvine will participate in a five-year, multi-institutional, $126 million grant from the National Institutes of Health supporting the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network. The project aims to describe the cells that make up the human brain in unprecedented molecular detail, classifying them into more precise subtypes and pinpointing their location.
As a full member of BICAN, UCI will receive $10 million to collect, process and characterize a broad range of adult brain specimens. An interdisciplinary UCI team, led by Xiangmin Xu, Ph.D., Chancellor’s Fellow of anatomy & neurobiology and director of the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping, will collaborate with scientists from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, UC San Diego and Washington University in St. Louis.
“We are pleased to participate in this very large-scale mapping project to identify individual brain cells’ molecular features, location and how they change over time,” said Xu, UCI principal investigator. “This precise description will advance our understanding of how individual cells and complex neural networks interact in both space and time, leading to new ways to treat and prevent disorders such as Alzheimer’s, autism, depression and traumatic brain injury. It will also create a new foundational network for analyzing health and disease structure and function.”
This is the latest in a series of large BRAIN Initiative projects coordinated by Xu and will leverage the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping’s strong infrastructure and extensive expertise. The team will partner with the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine’s Experimental Tissue Resource and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at UCI to obtain racially diverse samples from donors between 18 and 60 years old. These will be used for single-cell multiomics studies to gain a more comprehensive understanding of molecular changes contributing to normal development, cellular response and disease in human aging.
“The brain map we develop could help point disease researchers in the right direction,” said project contact and principal investigator Joseph Ecker, professor and director of the Genomic Analysis Laboratory at the Salk Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “Ultimately, this information might help us design gene therapies that target only the cell populations where treatment is needed – delivering the right genes to the right place at the right time.”
Other PIs are Margarita Behrens, research professor at the Salk Institute; Bing Ren, professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego; and Ting Wang, professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.