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Meeting report for the 2023 UC Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping Conference: structure, function and development of neural circuits

Molecular Psychiatry (2023)Cite this article

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The third annual conference hosted by the UC Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping (CNCM) was held on August 21–23, 2023, at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in Irvine, California [1]. Additional events also took place on August 24 on the UC Irvine campus. Hurricane Hillary generated additional anticipation ahead of the conference as she was forecasted to hit Irvine the night before the meeting, and to be the biggest storm in Irvine in ~100 years! To everyone’s relief, Hillary mostly petered out and was downgraded to a tropical storm by Saturday night. Thus, despite the “virtual option” we made available, nearly everyone attended the conference in person.

This annual summer conference brought together a strong multidisciplinary group of neuroscientists, developmental biologists, and clinicians. Speakers and attendees included Thomas Südhof, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013, John Ngai, Director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, Hongkui Zeng, Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Julio Licinio, Editor in Chief of Molecular Psychiatry, as well as a special delegation from the Cajal Institute of Madrid, Spain, and the Spanish Society of Neuroscience. Our conference was held in the tradition of the Cajal Club, the joint host of the 2021–2023 summer conferences (please see https://cncm.som.uci.edu/past-conferences/). Santiago Ramón y Cajal was the Spanish neuroscientist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for establishing the “neuron” as the basic unit of nervous structure [2]. In Cajal’s book, Advice for a Young Investigator (translated by University of Southern California Professor Larry Swanson), Cajal advised:

“Tackle small problems first, so that if success smiles and strength increases one may then undertake the great feats of investigation. This cautious approach may not always lead to fame, but at least it will earn for us the esteem of the learned and the respect and consideration of our colleagues” [3].

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Fig. 1: Conference commencement.
Fig. 2: UCI Center for Neural Circuit Mapping 2023 Conference group photograph.

References

  1. Grieco SF, Holmes TC, 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. 2023;28:2–3.

  2. Whitlock DG. The Cajal Club: its origin, originator and benefactor, Wendell J. S. Krieg. Brain Res Rev. 2007;55:450–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresrev.2007.01.006.

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  3. Ramón y Cajal S. Advice for a young investigator, 1897. Translated by Swanson N and Swanson LW. (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA) 2004.

  4. Yao Z, van Velthoven CTJ, Kunst M, Zhang M, McMillen D, Lee C, et al. A high-resolution transcriptomic and spatial atlas of cell types in the whole mouse brain. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.06.531121.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge and thank our speakers, including Hongkui Zeng, Maria Tosches, Yuki Oka, Silvia Arber, Fan Wang, Corey Harwell, Denis Jabaudon, Hollis Cline, Sergiu Pasca, Nenad Sestan, Tirin Moore, Leah Krubitzer, Cris Niell, Cory Miller, Karen Sears, Anna Molofsky, John Rubenstein, Thomas Südhof, Linda Richards, John Ngai, Ruth Benavides-Piccione, Carlos Vicario, Sandra Jurado, Juan M. Encinas, Laszlo Zaborszky, Don B. Arnold, Xiaoxiao Lin, Shen-Ju Chou, Alec J. Davidson, and Michel Baudry. We also would like to acknowledge the conference organizers, Hongkui Zeng, Leah Krubitzer, John Rubenstein, Edward Callaway, Liqun Luo, Bing Ren and Xiangmin Xu and our Center Staff Michelle Wu, Ginny Wu and Lin Lin. We acknowledge our institutional support from the UCI School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Science, UCI Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, UCI Office of Research, and UCI School of Medicine.

Funding

This conference received partial financial support from the following organizations: Vizgen, RWD, SFARI (Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative), Frontiers Media, the 4D Nucleome, Western University, and CHOC (Children’s Hospital of Orange County) Neuroscience Institute.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Steven F. Grieco & Xiangmin Xu

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

    Steven F. Grieco, Todd C. Holmes & Xiangmin Xu

  3. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Todd C. Holmes

Authors
  1. Steven F. Grieco
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  2. Todd C. Holmes
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  3. Xiangmin Xu
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Contributions

SFG, TCH and XX prepared the figure and wrote the report.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiangmin Xu.

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Grieco, S.F., Holmes, T.C. & Xu, X. Meeting report for the 2023 UC Irvine Center for Neural Circuit Mapping Conference: structure, function and development of neural circuits. Mol Psychiatry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-023-02308-4

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