The vision of the Integrated Circuit Cracking (ICC) NeuroNex Technology Hub, based at Stanford and the Salk Institute in California, is to build, disseminate, and support an integrated approach for molecularly defining neural circuit components, for tracing local and global wiring of those same circuit components, and for observing and controlling activity in those same circuit components during precisely controlled and quantified behaviors.

Research Resources Being Developed and Disseminated

The ICC NeuroNex Training Core runs a series of workshops and courselets open to the broader community to teach and disseminate modern current methods including optogenetics and CLARITY. As they are developed by the program, we will integrate new state-of-the-art methods with impacts across species, including fiber photometry, TRIO, cTRIO, TRAP2, rabies virus-based monosynaptic retrograde targeting, and voltage sensitive dye tools. We will develop new tools and significantly improve underlying technologies for greater cell-type specific access and improved detection and quantification of activity (calcium and voltage) and circuitry. Importantly, we will combine control/readout/anatomy tools and implement single-cell RNA-seq for combination with other circuit cracking tools. The integrative NeuroNex effort will allow the brain to be entirely analyzed in the format of linked optical images, including the datastream of in situ RNA sequencing, linked to cellular activity, leveraging the unique advantage of hydrogel-embedding with integrative advantages of global wiring, and spatially resolved transcriptomics. Together, such a multi-scale approach may provide unprecedented insight into how dynamics of single cells relates to brain states. All of these advanced hardware, software, and wetware strategies will be taught in the Training Core, alongside key concepts emerging from other centers.