 The brain is probably the most complicated object in the universe. And I think questions about how this sort of a remarkable organ that's responsible for all of our thoughts and feelings and cognition, how it's put together and how it functions is really fascinating. My name's Steve Wilson and together with Isaac Bianco we have a discovery award that is looking at brain asymmetry. That is the differences between the left and the right sides of the brain. And our project cuts across all scales going from the genes and molecular mechanisms that establish asymmetry in the brain through to the circuits and the behavioral consequences of brain asymmetry. Brain asymmetries are present across the entire animal kingdom. People have been fascinated by them for many years, but it's really not clear how those asymmetries come about and what purpose they serve. The first step of the project is to try to understand the developmental mechanisms that give rise to the differences between left and right sides. What are the genes and signaling pathways? Second part of the project is to ask what is the asymmetry good for? Suppose asymmetry is lost. What's the consequences of that upon the functioning of the brain? And so our work really addresses very fundamental mechanisms of understanding the organization, the structure and the function of the brain. Surprisingly, some of our best animal model systems, the mouse and fly, to date, haven't had very good systems for studying nervous system asymmetry. And so the zebrafish as a vertebrate has become a very prominent model system for looking at asymmetries. One of the main advantages of zebrafish for this type of work is that they have a tiny and optically transparent brain and this allows us to use advanced light microscopy techniques to look at the structure of the brain but also its activity in behaving animals. We can record these patterns of change and understand how the brain is processing information really at single cell resolution. One of the easiest types of behavior to study are visually mediated behaviors because we can show the fish different visual stimuli and see how the fish responds. The left side of the brain receives visual information. So if we are mutating a gene which is affecting the herbanila, the left side of the brain, we need to figure out whether what we are affecting is visual function or are we affecting the eye. What we have here is a free leaf moving fish. Below it we have a projector which is displaying the stimulus and from above it we have a camera which is going to be measuring or tracking the tail of the fish. We kind of mimic what would happen in real life with a fish and they are in the water. If there is water flowing towards them they would swim with it. Essentially this allows us to analyze each different parameter. I think the really exciting thing about this project is that we have a real opportunity to understand brain asymmetry across multiple scales all the way from genetic and molecular processes which contribute to the development of asymmetries through to looking at the function of asymmetric circuits across the entire brain and characterizing in detail animal behavior and understanding what effect those asymmetries have. Discovery research allows the investigator to follow wherever the science is taking them. So we find unexpected results all over the place and that allows us to pursue different lines of investigation depending upon the results of our previous experiments.