Massively Parallel Detection of Neuronal Activity

Associate Professor

University of Copenhagen

Tune Pers, associate professor, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, has been awarded a Lundbeck Foundation LF Experiments research grant worth DKK 1,943,144.

The purpose of this project is to develop a tool, SNAP (Single Neuron Activity Predictor), enabling massively parallel detection of neurons that exhibit changes in their activity levels upon stimulation. The idea is to exploit the fact that neurons react to stimulation with changes in their gene usage. By combining chemogenetic tools with highly efficient techniques for measuring gene expression and chromatin organization at the single-cell level and deep learning approach, a computational tool for neuron activity measurement with unprecedented scalability is proposed.