事件记录
播音员: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs. 《大发娱乐》在范围频道播出.
面试官: 我正在和医生谈话. 布莱恩·琼斯, 莫兰眼科中心的调查员 at the University of Utah. Now anyone who sees you knows that you carry a camera around with you wherever you go.
Dr. 琼斯: 我做.
面试官: And I suspect your love for photography might have come before you delved into science.
Dr. 琼斯: 是的.
面试官: I'm wondering if that passion for photography and how maybe we see the world or how the camera sees the world sort of influenced what type of research you're doing now?
Dr. 琼斯: 我最初是在大学接触摄影的. 我的第一个专业是电影研究. And I spent a lot of time with a Leica M6 camera and a Canon 1D camera that my parents had. 我爱上了摄影. I've had the privilege of knowing a couple of friends who have retinitis pigmentosa. One of my friends is an army veteran, and I've watched him go blind. 所以对我来说, the ability to do photography and to share what I see is a constant reminder of why the work we do is so important.
面试官: 这些天你在看什么? 是什么推动了你的研究?
Dr. 琼斯: 所以大发娱乐的实验室主要关注两个领域. 首先是了解视网膜是如何连接的. So the retina is this piece of gauzy tissue at the back of your eye that is an extension of the brain. And this brain tissue at the back of the eye is sort of a layer cake-like structure with 7,人类眼睛中有200个或更多的神经元. And it captures light, photons of light and then computes all the parameters required for vision. 捕捉对比度、亮度、边缘和运动. And calculates all these parameters and sends that information on to others and brain and cortex and sub-cortex for higher processing.
人们研究视网膜已经有150年了, 大发娱乐仍然不知道这7个是如何,200个或更多的神经元连接在一起. And that's the first mission of our lab is to try and pull apart that wiring and identify all the neurons and figure out how they are precisely wired together. 这是一个叫做连接组学的领域.
The second main mission of our lab is to understand how that structure and how the neuron identity and how the wiring is altered in diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration that steal vision from us.
面试官: 所以你看到的是电路本身?
Dr. 琼斯: 是的,女士.
面试官: 你是怎么做到的?
Dr. 琼斯: 所以有两种新方法已经被开创. 第一个是由. Robert Mark here at the University of Utah called computation molecular phenotyping. We basically use antibodies to serially label tissues and pull out smaller molecule fingerprints that uniquely identify populations of neurons. And then we insert those data into electron microscopy datasets.
大发娱乐把视网膜切得很薄. 每一部分都比光的波长细. 大约有90纳米. And then we section in the case of the mouse retina that we recently finished, 约1,490纳米切片, 然后大发娱乐重建了这些1,400 sections into a digital layer cake and create a volume and then we go in by hand and trace neurons all the way through the dataset along with all their connections, 它们的突触和间隙连接.
面试官: So the hope is to create like a three dimensional representation?
Dr. 琼斯: 是的. A three dimensional representation that we then extract out circuit topologies. So it turns out the circuit topologies are far more complex than we thought they were. And so we're now having to develop new software that can allow us to visualize how complex some of these topologies are. The circuit topologies are things that give us excitation and inhibition and ultimately end up tuning response profiles in retina.
面试官: 你知道, if you think about circuitry in how most of us think about circuitry, 我的意思是, if you look at the circuitry like in a computer or in the electronic system of a car, 我的意思是, 它并没有告诉你它是如何工作的. 是这样吗？?
Dr. 琼斯: So there was a pretty famous paper that came out a few months ago where they took a standard computer integrated circuit chip and they took it apart digitally and they tried to predict how it would work. And it turns out they didn't have a whole lot of information. 它没有发挥应有的作用. 或者至少是他们的模型, their predictive models that they thought how it would behave, 它并没有像芯片那样运作.
So while the circuitry is what we're after and the circuitry in any neural system is sort of the substrate that gives us a basic performance profile and ultimately makes us who we are, 还有很多大发娱乐不知道的. 所以对大发娱乐来说，连接组学框架, the circuitry framework we're trying to obtain is only the basic starting point.
It is a framework and on that framework we have to hang physiology, we have to hang physics and we have to put molecular biology and we have to put genetics into it. And so for us it's only the very beginning of understanding how neural systems are wired. Even though the science community has been studying the retina for 150 years. 在很多方面，大发娱乐仍处于起步阶段.
面试官: 所以这是一种新的前沿. 以前从未有人这样做过.
Dr. 琼斯: 是的,完全.
播音员: Interesting, informative and all in the name of better health. 大发娱乐是Scope健康科学广播.