Interview conducted by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Dec 15 2021
Thought LeadersDr. Adam Tyson Professor Troy MargrieBrainGlobe
An interview with Professor Troy Margrie, Associate Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, and Dr. Adam Tyson, former member of the Margrie lab and now the Scientific Software Lead at the Institute of Cancer Research.
Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what inspired your career into neuroscience?
AT: I am Adam Tyson, Scientific Software Lead at the Institute of Cancer Research, and also one of the co-founders and maintainers of the BrainGlobe Initiative. The reasons why I went into neuroscience originally were two-fold.
Firstly, I felt that neuroscience is one of the areas of biology that is still mostly unsolved and there’s lots to do. Secondly, there was a huge technological aspect to it: in neuroscience, there are a lot of techniques involved and analysis of large amounts of data, which fit well with my background.
TM: My name is Troy Margrie and I am a Professor of Systems Neuroscience at UCL and have been involved in experimental neuroscience for more than 25 years. From a very young age, I have been interested in how we and other animals learn. It all started with me spending a lot of time playing with my pet dog and teaching it various tricks.
I started thinking about how things such as the environment and reinforcement influence his behavior. That was the starting point, then like many other scientists, I had a very inspiring high school biology teacher who taught me to think about nature in a Darwinistic way and how such principles might even shape an individual organisms’ behaviors. Those two things are probably the key factors that got me interested in what the brain can do and how it informs us about the world around us.
Image Credit: MattLphotography/Shutterstock.com
How has the field of neuroscience changed over the last 20 years? What role has new technology played in this?
TM: I would say genetics has probably had the most significant impact. From flies to fish and mammals, it has enabled us to nail down particular cell types and circuits in complex systems that are otherwise very difficult to dismantle and understand their individual elements.
Now we can even use genetics to activate and silence specific circuits in the brain while the animal is performing a particular task. Without these tools, we would still be recording in the dark with limited ability to functionally target specific neurons or circuits. More recently other types of technologies, such as machine learning-based algorithms help us analyze and understand data, but I think the application of genetic tools has had the most impact on my generation.
BrainGlobe is an open-source platform for computational neuroanatomy. Please could you tell us more about the BrainGlobe platform and how it works?
AT: All brains are different, but we still need to study many different brains to understand a particular phenomenon. BrainGlobe provides tools to allow you to both extract information from images of brains and also to pull them together into a common average to build up atlases of brain structure and function.
We provide tools to allow researchers to develop their own 3D models of how the brain is working and we also provide tools that stretch across different fields of neuroscience, allowing researchers studying different animals to bring their results together.
What are some of the tools available to use at BrainGlobe? Are there any initiatives/applications that have especially benefitted from BrainGlobe?
AT: BrainGlobe includes a tool called cell finder which allows you to identify and locate individual cells marked by genetics in large images of entire brains. There’s another tool called brain render which allows you to visualize data from multiple brains together to explore in a single model of the brain.
The best example of an initiative that I think especially benefitted from BrainGlobe is described in a spinal connectome paper (Wang et al. 2021), where the entire paper is based on results that used our analysis and visualization tools.
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