Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested but not required): 30 days in advance of the full proposal deadline

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: 5 business days prior to submission

Sponsor Deadlines for Full Proposals: July 13, 2022; June 13, 2023

Award Information: Application budgets are not limited. The maximum project period is 5 years. The NIH BRAIN Initiative intends to commit an estimated total of $30M in FY2023 for this and companion funding announcements to fund approximately 15 awards.

This FOA solicits applications for Comprehensive Centers to develop the research capacity and technical capabilities to map human and non-human primate (NHP) brain connectivity, with goals of brain-wide coverage and comprehensive mapping of region-to-region connectivity at the level of axonal projections. Proposals may focus on a sub-volume of the central nervous system (CNS), provided the volume is sufficiently large to demonstrate feasibility of collecting, reconstructing, analyzing, integrating, disseminating, and interpreting projection-level connectivity maps of entire brains. The resulting feasibility data from these awards are expected to inform NIH decisions on program continuation in a potential subsequent five-year funding period for production of brain-wide wiring diagrams. Applications may propose limited testing and optimization using additional species beyond human and NHPs for testbed technology development, if strong scientific and cost justification is provided.

Applications must address the following five required research activity elements: (1) Sample Processing and Data Acquisition, (2) Data Processing and Management, (3) Integration and Dissemination, (4) Research Discovery, and (5) Feasibility Metrics and Milestones. Successful Centers will establish and scale complete pipelines from sample collection through data integration and dissemination, using state-of-art methods. They will automate and streamline processes for sample collection and data acquisition, optimize protocols for data management, and develop solutions for highly accurate circuit reconstruction. They will incorporate toolsets and infrastructure for seamless integration with other datasets of the same and different modalities, and for easy-access dissemination to the research community for collaborative annotation and analyses. They will apply their data to address research questions of high significance for understanding the relationship between structure and function of brain circuits.

Centers will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of projects from this FOA and its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.

Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested but not required): 60 days in advance of the full proposal deadline

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: 5 business days prior to submission

Sponsor Deadlines for Full Proposals: July 13, 2022; June 13, 2023

Award Information: Application budgets are not limited. The maximum project period is 5 years. The NIH BRAIN Initiative intends to commit an estimated total of $30M in FY2023 for this and companion funding announcements to fund approximately 15 awards.

This FOA solicits applications for Comprehensive Centers to develop the research capacity and technical capabilities to map mouse brain connectivity, with goals of brain-wide coverage and comprehensive mapping of local and long-range cell-to-cell connectivity at the level of synaptic connections. Proposals may focus on a sub-volume of the central nervous system (CNS), provided the volume is sufficiently large to demonstrate feasibility of collecting, reconstructing, analyzing, integrating, disseminating, and interpreting synapse-level connectivity maps of entire brains. The resulting feasibility data from these awards are expected to inform NIH decisions on program continuation in a potential subsequent five-year funding period for production of brain-wide wiring diagrams. Applications may propose limited testing and optimization using additional species beyond mouse for testbed technology development, if strong scientific and cost justification is provided.

Applications must address the following five required research activity elements: (1) Sample Processing and Data Acquisition, (2) Data Processing and Management, (3) Integration and Dissemination, (4) Research Discovery, and (5) Feasibility Metrics and Milestones. Successful Centers will establish and scale complete pipelines from sample collection through data integration and dissemination, using state-of-art methods. They will automate and streamline processes for sample collection and data acquisition, optimize protocols for data management, and develop solutions for highly accurate circuit reconstruction. They will incorporate toolsets and infrastructure for seamless integration with other datasets of the same and different modalities, and for easy-access dissemination to the research community for collaborative annotation and analyses. They will apply their data to address research questions of high significance for understanding the relationship between structure and function of brain circuits.

Centers will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of projects from this FOA and its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.

Sponsor Deadline for Letters of Intent (requested but not required): 30 days in advance of the full proposal deadline

FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: 5 business days prior to submission

Sponsor Deadlines for Full Proposals: July 13, 2022; June 13, 2023; June 13, 2024

Award Information: Application budgets are not limited. The maximum project period is 3 years. The NIH BRAIN Initiative intends to commit an estimated total of $30M in FY2023 for this and companion funding announcements to fund approximately 15 awards.

This FOA supports Specialized Projects to develop current or emerging technologies to generate comprehensive atlases of brain connectivity, with an emphasis on human, non-human primate (NHP), and mouse. Projects using other species are also permitted, if their use is well justified and the goal is to test and validate approaches that can be generalized across species. Applications may address any aspect(s) of data collection, reconstruction, analysis, integration, dissemination, and interpretation of brain connectivity and associated data pipelines, to enable faster, more precise, and more cost-effective generation and interpretation of brain-wide wiring diagrams. Proposals are encouraged to develop distinct capabilities and competencies that may be expected to complement Comprehensive Centers solicited by the companion FOAs, with aims of further developing and optimizing current technologies, or proposing entirely new, disruptive, and potentially risky approaches.

Funded projects will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of other Specialized Projects from this FOA, and Comprehensive Centers from its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing the capabilities to generate wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.