Maryann Martone

Co-Director of the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at the UCSD
UCSD
CA


Biography:
Maryann Martone received B. A. from Wellesley College in biological psycholory and Ancient Greek, and her Ph. D. in neuroscience in 1990 from the University of California, San Diego. Her thesis work on the neurochemical organization of the mammalian neostriatum was performed in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Groves. After receiving her degree, she joined the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, then newly founded at the University of California, San Diego by Dr. Mark Ellisman. The National Center is an NIH-established research resource dedicated to the advancement of 3D multiscale imaging technologies for unraveling the molecular and structural complexity of the nervous system. She is currently the co-director of the National Center and a Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Neuroscience at UCSD. Although she continues to investigate the structure of the nervous system using light and electron microscopy, for the past several years, she has been involved in the creation neuroinformatics resources to make high resolution 3D cellular imaging available to the scientific community. She is the head of the Cell Centered Database project (www.ccdb.ucsd.edu), an on-line database for electron tomography and correlated light and electron microscopic data. Her recent work has focused on building an ontology for describing the subcellular anatomy of the nervous system, and integrating such ontologies into image analysis and data mining tools. She serves as a member of the Neuroinformatics Committee for the Society for Neurosciences and is the co-chair of the Ontology Task Force of the Biomedical Informatics Research network, a large scale project to build computational and data resources for biomedical science.

Talk Title: Multiscale Integration of Brain Data: Imaging and Informatics

Abstract: The grand goal in neuroscience research is to understand how the interplay of molecular, and electrical signals in nervous tissue gives rise to behavior. Experimental advances of the past decades have given scientists an increasingly powerful arsenal for obtaining data across scales, from the level of molecules to nervous systems. The next challenge is to develop better methods for managing and integrating these data to enhance understanding of neural function in health and disease. As part of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) and Cell Centered Database (CCDB) projects, we are acquiring multidimensional datasets from animal models of human neurological disease that bridge from the gross anatomical to the molecular scale. Three-dimensional imaging techniques including whole brain magnetic resonance imaging, confocal and multiphoton microscopy and electron microscopic tomography are being employed to characterize the brains of mouse models of Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Electron tomography is a technique whereby the 3D structure contained in a section is solved by taking a series of projections through the structure. Together, these techniques allow the assessment of pathological processes across scales. An informatics framework consisting of a multiscale brain atlas and ontologies for multiscale anatomy is being constructed so that scientists can query and navigate structural and molecular distributions across scales. This informatics framework serves as the focal point for integrating additional types of data, e.g. microarray, with imaging data. To facilitate the construction of these models, an annotation environment is being created which allows spatial referencing and ontological mark-up concurrent with segmentation and analysis. Through deep annotation with a formal ontology, we are working to represent complex content in a form that will facilitate content-based and knowledge-based retrieval of multiscale data.