Project Overview
We have teamed up with Winfried Denk and Jörgen Kornfeld at MPI, Viren Jain at Google, and Michael Long at NYU to further develop a powerful set of tools for the acquisition, dense segmentation, cell-type annotation, and interrogation of mm-scale EM datasets.
Application of these tools in the songbird will provide a proof-of-principle demonstration of the power of integrated connectomic approaches for connecting neural circuit structure with computational function.
Our work focuses on understanding, at the synaptic scale, circuits in the basal ganglia that control vocal learning by integrating timing information, efference copy of motor signals, and reinforcement signals. We are also working to identify synaptically connected ‘chains’ of neurons in motor cortex thought to underlie vocal sequence generation.
