Notices of Funding Opportunities

This FOA will support integrated, interdisciplinary research teams that focus on examining dynamic circuit functions related to behavior, using advanced and innovative technologies. The FOA will support programs with a necessarily-synergistic, team science approach. Awards will be made for 5 years, with a possibility of one competing renewal. Applications should focus on overarching principles of circuit function in the context of specific neural systems underlying sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, cognition, decision-making, motor control, communication, or homeostasis. Applications should aim to understand these circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating relevant dynamic patterns of neural activity and by measuring the resulting behaviors and/or perceptions. Applications are expected to employ approaches and experimental design guided by specified theoretical constructs, are encouraged to employ quantitative, mechanistic and predictive models where appropriate. Model systems, including the possibility of multiple species ranging from invertebrates to humans, can be employed and should be appropriately justified. Programs should employ multi-component teams of research expertise including neurobiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists, as appropriate - that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration. Applications will be required to manage their data and analysis methods in a framework that will be developed and used in the proposed U19 project and exchanged with other BRAIN U19 awardees for further refinement and development.

This is a reissue of RFA-MH-21-135. This FOA supports the development of software to visualize and analyze the data as part of programs of building the informatics infrastructure for the BRAIN Initiative. Other informatics programs include developing data standards that are needed to describe the new experiments that are being created by or used in the BRAIN Initiative ( RFA-MH-19-146 ), and creating the data infrastructures that will house the data from multiple experimental groups ( RFA-MH-19-145 ). Each of the programs is aimed at building an infrastructure that is used by a particular sub-domain of experimentalists rather than building a single all-encompassing informatics infrastructure now. Building the infrastructure one experimental area at a time will ensure that the infrastructure is immediately useful to components of the research community. As our understanding of the brain improves, it may be possible to create linkages between these various sub-domain specific informatics programs. Investigators of the informatics programs should keep that goal in mind and build for the future even though the current efforts are more limited in scope.

Reissue of:RFA-NS-18-029 and RFA-NS-20-029. This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is designed to support teams of investigators that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration to elucidate the contributions of dynamic circuit activity to a specific behavioral or neural system. Applications are encouraged to propose adventurous and challenging goals that can only be tackled by a synergistic team-based approach and have the potential to be transformative and/or to enable significant advances. These studies at the exploratory stage are intended for the development of experimental capabilities and/or theoretical frameworks in preparation for a future competition for larger-scale or extended efforts, including the BRAIN TargetedBCP R01 or the multi-component, Team-Research BRAIN Circuit Programs (U19).The overall goal of this FOA is to enable a large-scale analysis of neural systems and circuits within the context and during the simultaneous measurement of an ethologically relevant behavior. Toward this end, teams are expected to assemble and leverage multi-disciplinary expertise, and to integrate experimental with computational and theoretical approaches. Teams are expected to bridge fields by incorporating rich information on cell-types, on circuit functionality and connectivity, in conjunction with sophisticated analyses of an ethologically relevant behavior of an organism or a well-defined neural system. Teams are also expected to aim for a mechanistic understanding of the circuits of the central nervous system (CNS) by applying cutting-edge methods such as those for large-scale recording, manipulation, and analysis of neural circuits across multiple regions of the CNS.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports Specialized Projects to develop current or emerging technologies to generate comprehensive atlases of brain connectivity, with an emphasis on human, non-human primate (NHP), and mouse. Projects validating approaches using other species are also permitted if well justified. Applications may address any aspects of the data collection, analysis, and dissemination pipelines, to enable faster and more cost-effective generation and interpretation of brain-wide wiring diagrams. Projects will offer distinct capabilities and competencies aimed at developing and optimizing current technologies or entirely new and potentially risky approaches. They will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of other Specialized Projects from this FOA, and Comprehensive Centers from its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.

(Reissue of RFA-NS-18-030) This FOA solicits applications for research projects that use innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior. The goal is to support projects that can realize a meaningful outcome within 5 years. Applications should address circuit function in the context of specific neural systems such as sensation, perception, attention, reasoning, intention, decision-making, emotion, navigation, communication or homeostasis. Projects should link theory and data analysis to experimental design and should produce predictive models as deliverables. Projects should aim to improve the understanding of circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating dynamic patterns of neural activity. Projects can use non-human and human species, and applications should explain how the selected species offers ideal conditions for revealing general principles about the circuit basis of a specific behavior.

(Reissue of RFA-NS-18-014 and RFA-NS-21-014) This R34 FOA solicits applications that offer a limited scope of aims and an approach that will establish feasibility, validity, or other technically qualifying results that, if successful, would support, enable, and/or lay the groundwork for a potential, subsequent Targeted Brain Circuits Projects - TargetedBCP R01, as described in the companion FOA (RFA-NS-22-026). Applications should be exploratory research projects that use innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior.

Reissue of RFA-MH-19-135 The purpose of this Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is to encourage applications that will develop and validate novel tools to facilitate the detailed analysis and manipulation of complex circuits and provide insights into cellular interactions that underlie brain function. Critical advances in the treatment of brain disorders in human populations are hindered by our lack of ability to monitor and manipulate circuitry in safe, minimally-invasive ways. Clinical intervention with novel cell and circuit specific tools will require extensive focused research designed to remove barriers to delivery of gene therapies. In addition to identification and removal of barriers, the need to specifically target dysfunctional circuitry poses additional challenges. Neuroscience has experienced an impressive influx of exciting new research tools in the past decade, especially since the launch of the BRAIN Initiative. However, the majority of these cutting edge tools have been developed for use in model organisms, primarily rodents, fish and flies. These cutting edge tools, such as viral delivery of genetic constructs, are increasingly adaptable to large brains and more importantly are emerging as potential human therapeutic strategies for brain disorders. A pressing need to develop tools for use in large brains, more directly relevant to the human brain is the focus of this initiative. The new tools and technologies should inform and/or exploit cell-type and/or circuit-level specificity. Plans for validating the utility of the tool/technology will be an essential feature of a successful application. The development of new genetic and non-genetic tools for delivering genes, proteins and chemicals to cells of interest or approaches that are expected to target specific cell types and/or circuits in the nervous system with greater precision and sensitivity than currently established methods are encouraged.

Reissue of RFA-MH-20-128 This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) solicits applications to develop standards that describe experimental protocols that are being conducted as part of the BRAIN Initiative. It is expected that applications will solicit community input at all stages of the process. It is recommended that the first step of standard development will involve sharing data between different key groups in the experimental community in order to ensure that the developing standard will cover the way that all of those groups are collecting data. The developed standard is expected to be made widely available.