In collaboration with labs from Caltech and the University of Southern California, his team will track each cell in the zebrafish brain to document the biological basis of sleep.
Zhao, an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience, will apply imaging mass cytometry technology to analyze tissue samples from Alzheimer’s patients.
The $500,000 award will go toward studying cellular influences on neuromodulator function.
The $7 million grant awarded to a team of collaborators is part of the NIH’s new Impact of Genomic Variation on Function Consortium.
The project aims to refine recombination-mediated cassette exchange (RMCE), an approach to inserting large DNA sequences into the genome, for use in the model organism C. elegans.
Richards, the head of the Department of Neuroscience, will apply the high-risk, high-reward grant to developing a new animal model for studying brain development.
Along with co-PI Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering, and collaborators including neuroscience professor Larry Snyder, Monosov will adapt an approach to controlling brain activity, called optogenetics, with the ultimate goal of repairing neural dysfunction.
The BRAIN Initiative funding will improve the ability of light field microscopy to record the activity of all neurons across the entire larval zebrafish brain as the animal swims freely.
The Washington University Center for Cellular Imaging will add a Zeiss LSM 980 Airyscan 2 microscope platform to its world-class collection of instruments.
The funding will support research on the function of a subset of microglia, immune cells that reside in the brain.