Scaling up connectomics at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology – from the first vertebrate connectomes to the mouse and beyond

What is the physical basis of memory? How do brains change during disease or injury? Could we make better AI by learning from brains? Answers would have huge scientific and societal impacts, but the brain is very complex. We now propose something conceptually simple but technologically challenging: obtaining the structure of complete vertebrate and mammalian brains and using this to reveal their algorithms. We see a time-critical opportunity to regain the UK’s leadership and to drive the field into new territory that, with investment, we at the LMB are ready to explore. We have identified four aims: 1) Reveal the changes that enable Drosophila to learn and remember. 2) Organisation of more complex insect brains. 3) Reveal the conserved architecture of the vertebrate brain. 4) Reveal mouse subcortical areas for sensorimotor-processing. We ask for a capital investment of £15.2M to obtain essential equipment, of which the centrepiece is the UK’s first multi-beam SEM instrument for orders of magnitude faster data collection. Included are sample preparation equipment, feeder instruments as well as compute and data storage. We will repurpose our Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy building to house the equipment and staff. The LMB will provide the resources needed for this.