This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) provides $800,485 to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) to investigate the role of human-specific 3D genome conformation in brain development and disease. The key research objectives are to: 1) analyze Hi-C data from cortical neural progenitor cells and neurons derived from human, chimpanzee, orangutan, and rhesus macaque to identify human-specific...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) provides $295,768 to The Washington University in St. Louis to conduct research on the evolutionary expansion of the human cerebral cortex. The research aims to generate more accurate maps of cortical expansion between humans and macaques, and to investigate the transcriptional signatures underlying this expansion and the emergence of new cortical areas....
This federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), under the Mental Health Research Grants (CFDA 93.242) program, provides $1,369,101 to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to conduct research on elucidating the regulation of cell fate specification in human cortical development. The goal is to better understand the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders. The project will evaluate the signals that drive cortical arealization and laminar...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Trans-NIH Research Support program (CFDA 93.310) provides $1,389,728 to The Trustees of Princeton University to conduct research on the evolutionary development of the primate neocortex. The project aims to apply molecular tools and genomic analyses to the common marmoset, an emerging primate model, in order to reconstruct the lineage relationships, progenitor population demographics, and connectivity patterns across...
The National Institute of Mental Health awarded a three-year Project Grant totaling $3,618,976 to the University of California, Los Angeles under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) to develop in situ single-cell multi-omic and morphological profiling methods for mammalian brains. Specifically, the university will work to design photonic-indexing sequencing strategies to spatially barcode tissue with single-cell resolution, integrating techniques such as PI-ATAC-seq and...
This $120,015 Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), under the Mental Health Research Grants (CFDA 93.242) program, supports research by Harvard University to develop a novel technological pipeline that enables monitoring of large-scale neural activity in freely moving animals and identifies the transcriptomic identity of the same individual neurons. The research aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms governing homeostatic, physiological, and social...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), under the Mental Health Research Grants (CFDA 93.242) program, provides $679,072 to President and Fellows of Harvard College to establish a platform that can accurately recapitulate and perturb cortical development and morphogenesis in vitro. The goal is to develop novel technologies that can reproduce key features of human forebrain development, including patterning, morphology, and regional cellular organization, and...
This $3,138,556 Cooperative Agreement awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under CFDA 93.242 - Mental Health Research Grants supports the development of novel RNA-based technologies to gain cell type-specific access across diverse vertebrate species. The project, titled "RNA Programmable and Scalable Brain Cell Type Tools Across Vertebrates," aims to establish a high-throughput screening pipeline to identify hundreds of cell type-specific RNA sensors that can be...
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded a $1,380,070 Project Grant (CFDA 93.242 - Mental Health Research Grants) to Duke University to explore the cellular properties and circuit functional roles of human cortical interneurons. This research aims to generate a multimodal phenotypic catalog of human interneurons and characterize their functional organization in neural circuits. The project will utilize live brain specimens collected from neurosurgical procedures and a novel genetic...
This $124,488 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) will support research to map cell type-specific isoform diversity in the human brain and dissect the mechanisms of alternative splicing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The project, led by Michael Margolis at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), will leverage long-read sequencing technologies to fully characterize the brain's...
This $1,411,593 Project Grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health (CFDA 93.242 Mental Health Research Grants) supports research to elucidate the cellular and molecular functions of a human-specific neural enhancer called "HAR123." The research aims to determine how HAR123 differs between humans, chimpanzees, and mice in its impact on neural progenitor cell generation and cognitive flexibility. The 5-year project, awarded to the University of California, San Diego, will involve in vitro studies of human and primate neural cells as well as in vivo analyses of HAR123 knock-in mouse models to understand how this ancient enhancer has evolved uniquely in the human lineage and contributed to human-specific traits.