The Long Term dataset
Next in Stall Catchers we are working on the "Long Term" dataset.
With the "Long Term" dataset we are seeking to understand how late into disease development an increase in brain blood flow, due to a decrease in capillary stalling, still leads to an improvement in performance on short-term memory tasks.
Our collaborators at Cornell University have already demonstrated that an increase in blood flow by reducing the number of stalls in the brain of Alzheimer's disease mice leads to improved congnitive functions and reduces symptoms of Alzheimer's. Read more about their research, recently published in Nature Neuroscience, here. Therefore, as the next step, it will be fascinating to know how far into disease development can an intervention targeting stalls still have a positive effect.
The dataset is already over 70% analyzed at the time of writing (that's because it was already active for a little bit before the Megathon!). To fully complete it, though, and get reliable crowd answers we will have to validate and verify it after the analysis stage is done, so there's plenty of work to go around! ;)