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Meeting report for the 2022 UC Irvine Center for neural circuit mapping conference: linking brain function to cell types and circuits

Molecular Psychiatry volume 28, pages 2–3 (2023)Cite this article

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Emerging evidence suggests that brain circuits can be therapeutically targeted to treat neurological, neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. To develop such therapeutic approaches in the clinic with precision, the targeted cell types and neural circuitry must be characterized with the brain function served. One successful recent approach is to identify cell type-specific circuits using genomic and neural tracing technologies along with experimental tests of their function. Despite remarkable progress on this front, there is still much work to be done. This motivated the program for the 2nd annual Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) summer conference held in Irvine, California in August 2022. The meeting considered the strengths and weaknesses of the current state-of-the-art approaches and concepts for linking brain function to structure. The following topics were discussed by twenty-one invited world-class neuroscientists: (1) Cell-type specific analysis of gene regulatory networks in neural circuits, (2) Cortical cell types and circuit function, (3) Local and global neural circuits for navigation and learning, and (4) Linking cell types and circuits to disease. This stimulating CNCM conference series will continue as a productive venue for future neuroscience discussions concerning neural circuit organization and function.

A distinguished and multidisciplinary group of scientists and clinicians met in an air-conditioned and well-caffeinated venue at the National Academies of Sciences Beckman Center, first conceived by Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, the inventor of a pH meter precursor instrument and many other workhorse scientific instruments. Arnold Beckman envisioned a West Coast center comparable to the National Academies of Sciences Conference Center in the District of Columbia (D.C.), where experts would discuss the most pressing matters of science and solve big problems. The roughly one-hundred and twenty attendees participated towards the common goals of the conference including addressing the hurdles of (1) “explainability” for testing cause and effect across different levels of biological organization of the brain [2, 3], and (2) how best to link brain function to cell types and circuits given the current state-of-the-art [4,5,6].

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Fig. 1: UCI Center for Neural Circuit Mapping 2022 Conference Group Photograph.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge and thank the conference organizers, Edward Callaway, TCH, Kim Green, Douglas A. Nitz, Bing Ren, Bert Semler and XX and our Center Staff Michelle Wu and Ginny Wu.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Steven F. Grieco & Xiangmin Xu

  2. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Todd C. Holmes

  3. Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM), University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Todd C. Holmes & Xiangmin Xu

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  1. Steven F. Grieco
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SFG, TCH, and XX prepared the figure and wrote the report.

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Correspondence to Xiangmin Xu.

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Competing interests

This conference received partial corporate support from sponsors AAVnerGene and Vizgen.

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Grieco, S.F., Holmes, T.C. & Xu, X. Meeting report for the 2022 UC Irvine Center for neural circuit mapping conference: linking brain function to cell types and circuits. Mol Psychiatry 28, 2–3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01810-5

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