"Daring in its scope" is how Edward Jones, director of UC Davis' Center for Neuroscience, describes the campus's new neuroscience imaging program that was launched in June by a $2 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. "What is quite novel here, " Jones says, "is the interplay between imaging formats from the whole brain down to individual molecules in a cell membrane. In our quest for the causes of schizophrenia and depression, we'll be taking visualization of the brain to a level not yet attained. "Digital imaging drives this program," says Jones, "but it is imaging that goes way beyond classical imaging techniques, which show us only the brain's surface. We can now visualize groups of nerve cells and show how they function together; we can image living cells, and even receptor molecules in the cell membrane." The grant received from the W.M. Keck Foundation will be used to acquire equipment essential for the program. However, Jones emphasizes that digital imaging is the technological means to a research end. "We can use this technology to study diseases such as schizophrenia and depression as well as add to our fundamental understanding of how the brain and nervous system work," he says. The project's centerpiece is a series of digital, three-dimensional brain images (human and monkey) that Jones terms "brain atlases." Jones' laboratory is jointly creating the atlases with assistant psychology professor Bruno Olshausen's laboratory and the Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing from thin slices of brains mounted on microscope slides. "The specific goal of the program," Jones says, "is to discover the causes of schizophrenia and depression; the broader objective is to develop a database of neuroscientific information that spans several orders of magnitude, from genes expressed in individual cells to entire brain regions. No one else is attempting to integrate neuroscientific information in this way." A scientist viewing the brain atlases will be able to examine the whole brain, focus on a certain region or zoom in on an individual cell. At the same time, the viewer can find out which genes are expressed in a particular region and what type of receptors are present in the membrane of the nerve cell. A user could also choose to watch a film of a developing synapse (the point at which one nerve cell communicates with another), and get an accurate picture of the brain's neuroanatomy -- -- how one area of the brain is connected to another. Database on the brain To fulfill the program's aim of a database that provides neuroscientists not only visual information but also data about the brain, campus faculty members will enter their research results into the brain atlases. For instance, Kimberley McAllister and Barbara Chapman, both Center for Neuroscience faculty members, will contribute data about synapse development and how the environment affects brain development, respectively. The Keck Foundation grant enables the Center for Neuroscience to purchase a highly specialized microscope that permits McAllister to study synapse formation in living cells. "Keeping a cell alive under a microscope is not an insignificant problem. The two-photon confocal microscope exposes cells to light for much less time, which keeps them alive longer," she says. Data about gene-expression patterns in schizophrenic and healthy brains will come from studies utilizing UC Davis' human brain tissue bank, which Jones established in conjunction with colleagues from UC Irvine. "The brain bank contains samples from deceased schizophrenic patients that are matched with samples from control brains," Jones says. "The matching is based on age, gender and certain other factors and is one of the strengths of our bank. You get much more powerful statistical analysis when brain samples are paired. It isn't easy to find matches, which is why it's a relatively small tissue bank, but a growing one, at this point." Since the campus's neuroscientists will continually add data to the brain atlases, the data sets could quickly become unwieldy. Creating software that allows scientists to efficiently store, index, retrieve and cross-reference large data sets is the purview of "informatics," a discipline that grew out of the need to manage the tremendous amount of information produced by molecular biology research, such as the human genome project. Frederic Gorin, a professor in the School of Medicine's of neurology and medical informatics departments, is facilitating this aspect of the project. Eventually the digital brain models and associated data will be available over the Internet to neuroscientists the world over. Debra Cleveland is editor in the Division of Biological Sciences.