Irvine, Calif., Sept. 22, 2022 – 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.

Read more: https://bit.ly/3SokCAv

Irvine, Calif., June 7, 2022 — The University of California, Irvine has been awarded a five-year, $14 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study brain circuits that are susceptible to aging and Alzheimer’s disease. The research findings will advance the development of early diagnostic tools and the discovery of new treatment strategies.

Xiangmin Xu, Ph.D., UCI Chancellor’s Fellow of anatomy and neurobiology and principal investigator, will lead an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team whose goal is to construct comprehensive, high-resolution maps of specific neuron types and their connections in critical brain circuits whose defects correspond with behavioral deficits associated with aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more: bit.ly/3znR2F2

We are pleased to report that we are ready for opening registration for our two-day in-person conference (August 15-16, 2022, cncm.som.uci.edu/2022-cncm-conference/).  This two-day in-person conference will cover timely and exciting topics of cortical brain circuits, cell types and function.  The attendee abstracts submitted will be selected for short talks or poster presentations. Please register early, as we have a capacity limit of ~120 attendees. 

Irvine, Calif., Jan. 10, 2022 — A research team led by University of California, Irvine has discovered new neural circuits that regulate spatial learning and memory in the brain’s hippocampal formation. The team identified novel functional roles of new circuit connections between the venal CA1 region and dorsal CA3 regions of the hippocampus and demonstrated that genetic inactivation of this projection impairs object-related spatial learning and memory, but does not modulate anxiety-related behaviors.

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Irvine, CA – November 15, 2021 – Researchers from the University of California, Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) have teamed with faculty from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) to publish a new guide for statistical analysis in neuroscience research.

(Click the URL below to read more)

https://www.som.uci.edu/news_releases/new_guide_for_neuroscience_statistical_analysis.asp

Irvine, CA – November 8, 2021 – The University of California, Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) has been awarded three new grants: a four year, $4.8M grant from the National Institute on Aging; a three year, $1.8M grant from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); and a one year, $.5M grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.  The grants will support the efforts of CNCM Investigators to develop powerful new molecular tools and will enhance resources offered by the Center to neurosciences researchers worldwide.

(Click the URL below to read more)

https://www.som.uci.edu/news_releases/Center_Neural_Circuit_Mapping_Grants.asp

We held a two-day in-person conference from August 20-21, 2021 (https://cncm.som.uci.edu/conferences/) to cover the newly emerging topics of both Connectomics and Transcriptomics in the field of Neuroscience, opened by Dean Michael Stamos. Our conference “sold out” with 107 attendees over our planned limit of 100. Our attendees were over 6/7s outside of UCI from throughout the US, and included many distinguished neuroscientists. Our feedback on the meeting was uniformly highly positive.

Irvine, Calif. – September 25, 2020 – In a new study, published in Current Biology, researchers from the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine reveal how subanesthetic ketamine, which is used for pain management and as an antidepressant in humans, is effective in treating adult amblyopia, a brain disorder commonly known as “lazy eye.”

“Our study, demonstrates how a single-dose of subanesthetic ketamine reactivates adult visual cortical plasticity and promotes functional recovery of visual acuity defects resulting from amblyopia,” explained Xiangmin Xu, PhD, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology and director of the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping at the UCI School of Medicine.

Subanesthetic ketamine, commonly used to treat depression and pain, evokes rapid and long-lasting antidepressant effects in human patients. There was evidence that ketamine may control how the nervous system makes structural changes in response to internal and external demands, a process called neural plasticity. But, how the drug worked remained elusive, until now.

“Our research team showed that ketamine down-regulates NRG1 expression in PV inhibitory cells, resulting in sustained cortical disinhibition to enhance cortical plasticity in adult visual cortex,” said Steven F. Grieco, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in the Xu lab and lead author. “Through this neural plasticity-based mechanism, ketamine mediated functional recovery from adult amblyopia.” Xin Qiao, PhD, a postdoctoral staff in the Xu lab is a co-first author for the published paper.

Amblyopia is a vision disorder in which the brain fails to process inputs from one eye, favoring the other eye. The condition can result in decreased vision in the affected eye. Each year, between one and five percent of children worldwide, are diagnosed with this condition.

Fast and sustained ketamine actions show promise for therapeutic applications that rely on reactivating adult cortical plasticity. Further testing is needed to determine the full implications of this discovery.

This study was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health grants.