Memory Focus of $5 Million Program Project Renewal

John Byrne, Ph.D.

Armed with a $5 million National Institutes of Health program project grant renewal, a group of University of Texas Medical School at Houston researchers are poised to reveal the mysteries of memory by using computer simulation and mathematical modeling.

The grant provides the funding for four projects aimed at creating a model of the brain’s hippocampus – from molecules to neural networks. The hippocampus is located in the brain below the outer cortical areas. It is a part of the limbic system, which is involved in emotion, as well as memory.

“The hippocampus is critical to memory function, and we aim to make a unified model to explain how it works. No one has brought all of the pieces together before to see how it all fits,” said John Byrne, Ph.D., principal investigator of the program project grant and chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy.

Such a model could aid in treatment of memory disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, and in understanding memory-enhancing drugs. It also could be used in education to understand memory and learning patterns.

This is a grant renewal of a previous five-year program project grant, which focused on diverse brain systems.

“This time we are focused on the specific area of the hippocampus. With multiple projects aimed at a common problem, we believe the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts,” said Byrne, who is the holder of the June and Virgil Waggoner Chair.

This type of research, computational neuroscience, is an emerging area of biomedical science in which the Medical School is strengthening its expertise. Computational neuroscience pairs computer science with biomedical research to glean deeper insight into mechanisms of complex biological systems.

“This grant shows our strength at the national level in computational neuroscience and our commitment to this Texas Medical Center-wide initiative,” Byrne said. “In a collaborative effort through the Gulf Coast Consortia (GCC), institutions throughout the Houston/Galveston area have joined forces and consider as one of their top goals, training new scientists at the intersection of biological sciences with computational and physical sciences. This program project grant contributes to the training initiative in Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience within the GCC, aiming to eliminate cross-institution redundancies, while creating a more advanced and comprehensive graduate program.”

Each project has a leader or co-leaders:

Paul Smolen, Ph.D., senior research scientist, and Byrne;
Neal Waxham, Ph.D., professor, and John Putkey, Ph.D., professor;
James Knierim, Ph.D., associate professor, and Michael Mauk, Ph.D., professor;
Harel Shouval, Ph.D., assistant professor; and
Douglas Baxter, Ph.D., professor, who leads the core. The core includes the hardware and software needed for the computational research.

All the leaders and co-leaders are in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy except Putkey, who is in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. All except Smolen also have faculty appointments in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston.

By Darla Brown, Medical School