# MULTIREGIONAL ELECTRICAL ENCODING OF SOCIAL AGGRESSION

> **NIH NIH R01** · DUKE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $565,209

## Abstract

MULTIREGIONAL ELECTRICAL ENCODING OF SOCIAL AGGRESSION
Critical developments in neuroscience have included technologies for sequencing individual brain cells,
progress towards completing a full mesoscale brain cell atlas in mice, new tools for monitoring and
manipulating the activity of brain cells, refined imaging techniques for developing structural and functional
connectome atlases in humans, and new objective measures for characterizing behavior across species.
Nevertheless, a critical gap that has yet to be addressed is the development of a model that would allow this
emerging catalog of cellular information to be linked to the broad functional networks that encode emotional
behavior in mammals. This gap exists in part because 1) technologies that measure, monitor, and decode
mesoscale activity throughout the depth of the brain during free behavior in mammalian model species have
yet to be implemented in conjunction with cellular activity can be monitored and manipulated, and 2) theoretical
frameworks that link cellular activity to mesoscale network activity and that generalize across subjects on a
mouse-by-mouse basis have yet to be developed.
Our multi-disciplinary team has built a suite of tools for studying how brain dynamics encode complex brain
states. These include advanced techniques to measure and monitor brain dynamics in vivo concurrently for
months across many regions located throughout the depth of the brain at high spatiotemporal resolution in
freely-behaving mice, machine-learning analytic approaches that build individual circuit activity measures into
composite networks, behavioral manipulations that can be used to induce brain states related to emotions, viral
methods that probe the relationship between cellular changes and the expression of brain-wide neural
dynamics, and closed-loop stimulation tools that can potentially test the causality of brain network-states in
mediating emotion. By integrating this suite of tools in a single framework, we intend to create a model that will
catalogue how the brain generates aggression. Critically, we believe that this model framework will be broadly
applicable to other emotional brain states as well.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10124784
- **Project number:** 1R01MH125430-01
- **Recipient organization:** DUKE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** David E Carlson
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $565,209
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-04-15 → 2026-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10124784

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10124784, MULTIREGIONAL ELECTRICAL ENCODING OF SOCIAL AGGRESSION (1R01MH125430-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10124784. Licensed CC0.

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