“To understand how a system works, you need to first build a parts list. Our brain has more than 20 times more cells than there are people in this world,” said Hongkui Zeng, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, and lead investigator on several BRAIN Initiative-funded studies. “In a human brain, there are more than 160 billion cells. Each color represents a different individual neuron. Studies like this will help neuroscientists piece together detailed views of neural circuits. A new study led by researchers at the Allen Institute and Southeast University in Nanjing, China, captured the detailed 3D shapes of more than 1,700 individual neurons in the mouse brain, the largest dataset of its kind to date. The atlas is described in a special package of 17 articles published today (October 6, 2021) in the journal Nature, including a single flagship paper that describes the entire atlas.Ĭomplete, brain-wide reconstructions of several different types of mouse neurons in 3D.
Its creators, a large consortium of neuroscientists brought together by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative, say this brain atlas will pave the way for mapping the entire mammalian brain as well as better understanding mysterious brain diseases - including those that attack the neurons that control movement, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Now, for the first time, the neurons and other cells involved in a region of the human, mouse and monkey brains that controls movement have been mapped in exquisite detail. At the cellular level, that quick motion is a highly complicated process and, like most things that involve the human brain, scientists don’t fully understand how it all comes together.
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