The Allen Institute for Brain Science just launched OpenScope, a project that will give researchers around the world access to the Institute's "observatory of the mind" to study the activity of hundreds to thousands of nerve cells in the visual cortex of the mouse.
OpenScope is a project that opens the Allen Brain Observatory, which was launched in 2016, to researchers outside the Allen Institute. The observatory is a standardized, high-throughput experimental platform built and run by a team of nearly 100 different experts with the common goal of understanding how the brain works by watching its neurons and circuits in action.
Currently, the observatory is focused on the mouse visual system. To run experiments, researchers show the rodents different images or movies and record cellular activity from the animals' visual cortex in six different areas. Data collected from more than 65,000 different neurons has been deposited in a publicly accessible database.
External researchers are already using the data generated from the observatory's experiments and publishing studies based on their analyses, but now other researchers can propose and lead their own experiments on the platform. Through OpenScope, scientists can propose research projects related to the visual system, which are then reviewed by a scientific committee. Once proposals are selected, Allen Institute experts run their experiments and provide the data and metadata for analysis directly to the lead researchers at the external universities or companies.
"With OpenScope, we are pioneering a model where scientists can focus on the science rather than on learning and mastering a number of different experimental techniques," said Jérôme Lecoq, Ph.D., senior manager of optical physiology at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. "Our goal is to build a complimentary path to the existing academic model in the pursuit of knowledge."
Three research projects addressing questions about the visual system have been accepted for 2018, fully funded by the Allen Institute, and data collection is currently underway. These projects were proposed by research teams comprised of external and internal researchers from academia, industry and nonprofit sectors.
University of Montreal machine learning Professor Yoshua Bengio, Ph.D., is part of a team conducting an OpenScope project aimed at understanding how learning in the visual system is coordinated between different parts of the brain, and how deep learning principles unearthed by the artificial intelligence community may have parallels in the mammalian brain.
"The unique computerized facilities of OpenScope will help to explore how rodents learn when faced with unexpected circumstances," Bengio said. "I believe this is just the beginning of a very exciting venture to make better sense of the learning principles in the brain at the network level."
Image: Jerome Lecoq sets up a microscope in the Allen Brain Observatory. It is run by a team of nearly 100 expert engineers, scientists and technicians. Through the OpenScope program, researchers from around the world can apply to run their own experiments in the observatory. Image courtesy of Allen Institute.