UW Receives $10.3 Million for Neuroscience Research

June 29, 2006 -- The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $10.3 million, five-year grant for neuroscience research at the University of Wyoming.

The grant, one of the largest in UW's history, will support neuroscience projects aimed at advancing understanding of plasticity of the nervous system, says Bill Flynn, principal investigator and director of UW's Neuroscience Program. He says plasticity is the ability of the nervous system to change in response to the environment, experiences, or trauma. This research is part of the NIH Blueprint for the Neurosciences.

"We will study activity-dependent changes in the way the brain is organized and how neurons, the cells of the brain, are interconnected and function," says Flynn. "The investigators will work on interrelated projects that seek to understand how the structure and organization of the brain and spinal cord adapt to changes in sensory (light, touch, pain) information. The scientific objective is to identify how different types of sensory stimulation affect the organization, development, and function of neural systems.”

He says a unique strength of the Neuroscience Center is the merger of neural sciences and bioengineering to characterize (model) activity-dependent modification of circuitry underlying sensory system function.

“Through collaborative efforts, computational processing algorithms may be developed to model activity-dependent changes in mature, functional nervous systems," Flynn says.

The research has implications for understanding how, for example, sensory deprivation in children may lead to abnormal brain function as adults.

Children who experience sensory neglect through isolation or visual birth defects (such as the presence of cataracts) display cognitive disabilities as adults, Flynn says. Some abnormal brain function may be reversible, depending on when and for how long the depravation occurs during critical periods of development. As such, research aimed at identifying mechanisms underlying activity-induced plasticity of the brain and whether there are critical periods during development when the brain is most susceptible to sensory experience have immediate health relevance.

"Projects will approach this fundamental issue in several ways. For example, we know that during early brain development, neurons in the brain establish connections with other neurons that are then refined by experience,” Flynn says. “Project researchers will identify how sensory experience controls that refinement from an immature to a normal, adult-function brain.”

Other project researchers are studying how the pathways that relay pain information normally develop and how they may be adversely affected to produce states such as chronic pain.

"So we are looking at a number of sensory systems, how they may change, and how they may affect the animal's behavior," Flynn says.

Other project investigators are Steven Barrett of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Donal Skinner, Qian-Quan Sun and Jeff Woodbury, all with the Department of Zoology and Physiology. The grant also will support faculty recruitment, neuroscience graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and seminars.

The NIH grant continues funding that established a UW Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) that allows scientists to develop research centers and infrastructure in certain specialty areas. Receiving such a large grant demonstrates the strength of UW's neuroscience faculty and research infrastructure, Flynn says. Through COBRE grants, UW research capabilities have been enhanced to be nationally competitive in many areas.

Enhancements include, among others, a Microscopy Facility that is open to researchers across campus, plus Macromolecular Core facilities for analyzing biological chemicals within the brain, and other biological tissues.

Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2006