All Institute aims to crack the neural code

New science Chief provides a neural "Observatory" to determine, which play part in behavior to brain cells.Christof Koch.

Christof Koch, chief scientific officer was named last week by Allen Institute for brain research. Researchers at the Institute - set up Allen in Seattle, Washington, with a 100 - million-dollar donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul – have spent the last eight years to create three-dimensional Atlas of mouse and human brains that combine anatomical and genomic data. Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, told nature why the Institute next big project map of neural activity or code, underlying certain behaviors, and will be to make these data public.

Why you took the job?

It is an unprecedented opportunity. The Allen Institute you can get an enormous amount of money, technology and people to a particular problem in a way, that you at a University, not where you must ensure that each student has their own niche, get their PhD and gets first authorship on a paper focus.

What problems do you post?

The idea is to focus on one or two behavior - how we, for example, see smell or remember - and questions represent how the information is encoded, and transformed cause behavior.

The challenge is a bit like the creation of the thirty meter telescope, which will be built up on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in the next ten years, at a cost of about $1 billion. There you have on a few hundred people, which all work a common goal.

Neuroscience was not something like that, but the time right, all these resources to a single question, bear not 20 questions in 10 different animals, each behaves differently to yourself. Essentially, you create a brain Observatory, where you try to study behavior in detail about the brain and make the data available to other people.

Many Labs study already neural encoding. As your efforts will be different?

Each one of these labs use different techniques, different animals, behaviors, electrodes, genes, statistical standards and mathematical analysis. There are basic neuroscience questions which already have 20, 30, 40 years, which resolved were still not, because we can some standards. People tend to be the same brand of toothbrush as the same type of micro electrodes or use statistical methods.

This is a big change for the Allen Institute, which is known for his brain atlases?

It is still about the product: data that are placed outside. But it's not only data, it is understanding – what are the deep principles of the neural encoding? This applies to the challenges of the information process and encoding, because that is what the neuroscience community and Paul Allen are interested in.

How do you sort of behaviour decide to address?

There are workshops and conferences where we invite senior researchers in neural coding, modeling, electrical recording and Optogenetics. An Advisory Committee help us decide, what technologies to which technologies to develop and study which species.

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It is a difficult problem, but I think Neuroscience is pretty sophisticated. Until recently, we could only do what is Astronomy: to observe. But new Optogenetic tools allow us to intervene, to neurons turn on and off. So, we can move now mere correlation and monitoring to causation. It is an exciting time.

Still, you have lab your own research?

I will spend my time at the Institute of Allen 75% and 25% at Caltech. We make all kinds of very exciting things in my lab now, and I do not want to leave it. We are recording the activity of individual cells from human brain, we are studying Biophysics of the brain and we are the neural basis of consciousness study.

Overlap your two jobs?

I studied consciousness 25 years and we have each technology in the voluntary patient is used. But to understand consciousness, we need to can the activity of millions of individual neurons at the same time image. There is no way for the foreseeable 20 or 40 years, which happens in humans. But this is feasible in mice. We can do this in the next 5 to 10 years.

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