Wolfson Foundation - Facility for Neuroimaging of Brain Dynamics in Health and Disease
The Wolfson Foundation is a charitable organisation that supports biomedical research through the provision of funding for research infrastructure.
In 2006, generous support to the Institute of Neuroscience, enabled us to establish a facility to conduct research on live human brain tissue obtained during neurosurgery.
This important tissue makes it possible to study neuronal activity in the normal and pathological situation in order to understand the basis of neurological disorders, such as epilepsy, and psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia.
The imaging and recording facility permits us to build important bridges between single cell and network activity and between human disorders and animal models that will aid the development of novel therapies.
The facility includes:
- confocal microscopic systems for high speed imaging of intracellular calcium in multiple neurons;
- a system for near real-time imaging of voltage-sensitive dyes for detailed neuronal network analysis;
- a high-density multielectrode array for recording electrical activity across brain slices;
- and equipment to perform ultrastructural analysis of the human tissue following periods of recording.
Additional funding from the Medical Research Council has enabled us to also conduct in vivo recording from implanted 64 channel electrode grids for comparison with the in vitro measures.
