President Obama Genomics And Connectomics Brain Activity Map Project The American Job Game Changer
Houston, Texas ( AP) -- Barrons Medical Journal was excited when 2003.President Clinton and Tony Blair Announced Brought To You By Orange Shoe Personal Fitness Video: that they were together starting " The Human Genome Project ". Ten years later President Obama is now going to fund "The Brain Activity Map Project ". The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics:
Barrons Medical Journal asked The CEO of Gennxeix Biotech Inc Rose Conrad A Houston Based Biotech company to explain to us what is all the excitement all about.
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Conrad said lets start by imaging. that your goal is to discover how a brain works. A map of brain connections would be helpful for interpreting measurements of the signals transmitted between neurons. In the human brain, these signals travel in a complex network of 100 billion or so neurons, each of which is connected to 10,000 others
The function of neural circuits is an emergent property arising from the coordinated activity of large numbers of 
neurons. To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits.
Conrad said that\ in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double helix structure for DNA. The double helix consists of a long chain of repeated units called nucleotides, of which there are four types: A, C, G, and T. Hereditary information is written in DNA using this alphabet of four letters. In the human genome, the sequence of nucleotides is about one billion letters long. The reading of this sequence was finally completed by the Human Genome Project in 2003.
Barrons Medical Journal spoke with Francis Collins The CEO of The National Institutes of Health.Collins said that, the scientists at NIH and private foundations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle will all be participating in the project .
First, connectomics will help reveal how the brain stores and retrieves information about the past. Neuroscientists believe that memories are stored in the connections between neurons. According to this theory, connections change when a new memory is stored. That such changes can happen is not in doubt. Neuroscientists have found that new synapses can be created and that the strengths of existing synapses can be altered. What remains uncertain is whether these changes are indeed the basis of memory.
Although the connection theory of memory is widely believed, it has been difficult to test experimentally. One barrier has been the lack of good techniques for measuring whether two neurons are connected, and if so, how strongly. One important task of connectomics will be to determine the connectivity of brain areas that are involved in memory storage. 
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Take, for example, sequential memory, such as the notes of a piece played on the piano. A pianist is able to store such sequences in memory and recall them at will. Recently, sequential memory has been studied by neuroscientists in the brain of the zebra finch. This bird learns a single, highly repetitive song as a juvenile and sings it repeatedly as an adult. The avian brain area called HVC appears to be important for a bird’s memory of its song. Creating a lesion in the HVC in adult birds causes a loss of song. Furthermore, electrical recordings of “projection” neurons in the HVC, which send long branches (axons) to downstream brain areas, have revealed a precisely timed, repeated sequence of neural activations while the bird sings this song. The zebra finch song consists of repetitions of a 
single motif, which is about one second long. During a song motif, each projection neuron in the HVC is activated exactly once, for just a few milliseconds. For every repetition of a motif, the projection neurons are activated in the same sequence. The projection neurons of the HVC activate other neurons in an area called RA, which in turn activate the motor neurons that control the syrinx, the avian vocal organ. Therefore the sequential activation of HVC neurons is believed to be directly responsible for the sequence of movements that produces birdsong.
President Obama said in the State Of The Union Address For “Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” he said. “Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.”
A meeting held on Jan. 17 at the California Institute of Technology was attended by the three government agencies, as well as neuroscientists, nanoscientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm. According to a summary of the meeting, it was held to determine whether computing facilities existed to capture and analyze the vast amounts of data that would come from the project. The scientists and technologists concluded that they did.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently developed a publicly accessible Internet-based collection of data which identifies a region in the brain where thousands of gene-regulating elements necessary for cognition, motor functions are emotions are found.
Axel Visel, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab's Genomics Division who worked on the latter project, referred to it as "a genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the human brain."
Organizations behind the project include the Office of Science and Technology Policy, The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, as well as several private foundations the president will allot a total of at least $3 billion over the next 10 years.
Barron Medical Journal is advising The State Of Texas To reinstate the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Texas can play important role in The Brain Activity Map Project and create millions of jobs for Texans.
Texas House and Senate budget bills provide no money for new grants by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, the target of multiple investigations following revelations of procedural problems and conflicts of interest related to multimillion-dollar grants it has awarded.
Encourage your Texas elected official to be a part of this wonder new project that is going to extend and save patients live over the next 50 years
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