Neuroscientists At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Are Only LI Recipients Of Special NIH Grants For “Transformative” Research

(Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) – Two neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) are among an elite group of only 42 researchers nationwide — and the only Long Island based researchers — chosen by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to receive special grants for “transformative” research.

Professor Partha Mitra, Ph.D. and Assistant Professor Josh Dubnau, Ph.D., were awarded the five-year grants to fund innovative brain-related research projects.

This is the first year the NIH has awarded the type of grant won by Mitra and Dubnau, called “transformative R01” grants, or T-R01s.  They were devised with the bold purpose of encouraging “exceptionally innovative, high-risk, original and/or unconventional research that has the potential to create new or challenge existing scientific paradigms,” according to the NIH.

“This is wonderful news for Partha and Josh, whose work deserves to be recognized for its freshness and potential to change our way of understanding how the brain works,” commented Bruce Stillman, Ph.D., CSHL’s president.  “It’s also a reflection of the continuing role played by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in bringing together scientists of the highest caliber who are given the freedom in a nurturing environment to tackle biology’s most important problems.”

Mitra: “Mouse Brain Architecture” project

Mitra’s T-R01 project addresses a problem that he calls fundamental.  Even after decades of applying our most sophisticated technologies to the study of the mammal brain, “we still know comparatively little about how it is connected,” he observes.  Mitra and colleagues will use their grant to produce the first brain-wide circuit diagram for the mouse. 

The lack of a circuit-diagram at the whole-brain level is “arguably the biggest knowledge gap in contemporary neuroscience,” according to Mitra, who is equally excited about the project’s second phase.  “Once we’ve made a ‘reference’ map of the circuit, we’ll map the circuitry in mice bearing genetic mutations, to see how connectivity in their brains compares with that of the reference map,” explained Mitra, “We want to see how the brain-wide connectivity map is altered in the mice with mutations associated with neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.” 

Dubnau: Tracing how brain proteins are regulated  

Josh Dubnau’s “transformative” project addresses another important gap in knowledge: how a fundamental step in the conversion of genetic information — its “translation” from RNA to protein — is regulated in neurons, the cells of the brain whose dense web of connections underlie our capacity to perform sophisticated functions such as forming and storing memories. 

“If neurons are to function properly, they need to control with exquisite precision where each protein in their structure is synthesized, explains Dubnau.  “When that process is disrupted in the human brain, severe cognitive problems can follow. Fragile-X mental retardation is an example, which we will study in the context of the misregulation of protein synthesis.”

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation’s Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, not-for-profit research and education institution at the forefront of efforts in molecular biology and genetics to generate knowledge that will yield better diagnostics and treatments for cancer, neurological diseases and other major causes of human suffering.  For more information, visit www.cshl.edu.