The human brain carries out more complex processes than any other organ, and to do this, it needs a lot of energy — roughly 20 percent of the energy the body makes. However, we still don’t fully understand how the brain creates energy, rations it out or uses its available supply to execute critical functions.
The Simons Collaboration on Brain Energetics (SCOBE) , launched today, will explore these questions by studying the interplay between how the brain creates and uses energy, as well as how it functions under metabolic stress. The collaboration provides $80M over 10 years to a group of 26 investigators across systems and computational neuroscience, cellular and molecular biology, engineering and theory.
“Every thought and action depends on neurons performing computations that are extraordinarily costly in energy terms, yet we don’t understand how those energetic limits shape the way the brain is built and how it computes,” says Kelsey Martin , executive vice president of the foundation’s Autism and Neuroscience division. “This collaboration brings together experiments across species and scales with theory to reveal the principles linking energy supply and demand to how neural circuits compute and how behavior arises.”
“The Simons Foundation’s neuroscience collaborations are designed to understand fundamental principles of brain function, and brain energetics is a critical example of that,” says Alyssa Picchini Schaffer , vice president and senior scientific officer of the foundation’s neuroscience collaborations . “Brain energetics likely impacts everything from how the brain carries out computations to our basic understanding of autism, neurodevelopment and aging. It’s one of the backbone constraints for understanding the brain that we need to address to push the field forward.”
SCOBE will focus on four major topic areas:
Brain energetics at the single-cell level will examine how much energy different types of brain cells need to perform specific tasks (such as firing signals or clearing waste) and how they work together to allocate resources. Researchers also plan to develop new sensors that can track energy-related molecules such as glucose and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as they move through cells, providing a detailed map of energy allocation and expenditure.
Energetics across brain circuits will explore how energy availability shapes computational processes (such as vision, navigation or memory) that require large networks of cells. These studies will ask whether more demanding computations require more energy and how the brain prioritizes them when energy is limited.
Neurovascular coupling will look at the relationship between the brain and its blood supply. These projects study how neurons communicate with blood vessels to change how much energy they receive. In clarifying this process, the researchers hope to also improve how scientists interpret techniques like fMRI, which measures changes in blood flow as a proxy for neural activity and which is widely used in current neuroscience research.
Adaptation to energy scarcity will investigate how the brain adapts to changes in energy availability. The amount of energy shuttled to the brain can fluctuate for many reasons, such as chronic metabolic conditions (like diabetes), decreased oxygen levels or pregnancy. These studies will explore how the brain remains resilient under high energy demand or metabolic challenge and what happens when those protections break down.
To address these areas, SCOBE investigators will study worms, flies, mice and humans. This diversity will also allow them to determine which principles of brain energetics are shared across species.
Like all the foundation’s neuroscience collaborations, SCOBE will have a strong focus on theory, computation and data sharing.
“Not a lot of past research into brain energetics has taken a theoretical or computational approach, so I’m optimistic about what we will learn by applying advanced modeling techniques to integrate diverse data types,” says Hannah Bayer , a senior scientific officer in neuroscience collaborations. “We are also committed to open data and are looking forward to sharing our findings with the broader research community.”
The following are the team of SCOBE investigators:
Anton Arkhipov
Allen Institute
Ghazaleh Ashrafi
Washington University
Erin Barnhart
Columbia University
Kwabena Boahen
Stanford University
Thomas Clandinin
Stanford University
Daniel Colón-Ramos
Yale University
Emily Jane Dennis
Janelia Research Campus
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Anna Devor
Boston University
Gaute Einevoll
University of Oslo
Surya Ganguli
Stanford University
Lisa Giocomo
Stanford University
Chenghua Gu
Harvard University
Balijit Khakh
University of California, Los Angeles
Laura Lewis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jonathan Polimeni
Harvard University
Massachusetts General Hospital
Stanford University
Priya Rajasethupathy
Rockefeller University
Vidhya Rangaraju
Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience
Nathalie Rochefort
University of Edinburgh
Tim Ryan
Weill Cornell Medicine
Sava Sakadzic
Harvard University
Massachusetts General Hospital
Nirao Shah
Stanford University
Longzhi Tan
Stanford University
Alison Tebo
Janelia Research Campus
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
John Vaughen
University of California, San Francisco
Tim Vogels
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Gary Yellen
Harvard University
About the Simons Collaborations in Neuroscience
The goal of the Simons Collaborations in Neuroscience is to bring together groups of outstanding scientists to address fundamental questions about brain function, with a focus on fields in which significant new developments have created novel opportunities for exploration. The foundation currently supports four neuroscience collaborations: the Simons Collaboration on Brain Energetics, the Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience, the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain and the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain.
For more information, please contact press@simonsfoundation.org.