Thanks to a mouse watching clips of The Matrix, scientists have created the largest functional map of a brain to date—a diagram of the wiring connecting 84,000 neurons as they fire off messages. Using a piece of that mouse's poppy seed-size brain, the researchers identified those neurons and traced how they communicated via branchlike fibers through a surprising 500 million junctions called synapses. The massive dataset, published Wednesday by the journal Nature, marks a step toward unraveling the mystery of how our brains work.
"It definitely inspires a sense of awe, just like looking at pictures of the galaxies," said Forrest Collman of Seattle's Allen Institute for Brain Science, one of the project's lead researchers. "You get a sense of how complicated you are." How we think, feel, see, talk, and move are due to neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain, specifically via how they're activated and send messages to each other. Scientists have long known those signals move along fibers called axons and dendrites, using synapses to jump from one neuron to the next. But there's less known about the neuron networks that perform certain tasks and how disruptions of that wiring could play a role in Alzheimer's, autism, or other disorders.
For this project, a global team of more than 150 researchers mapped neural connections that Collman compares to tangled pieces of spaghetti winding through part of the mouse brain responsible for vision. The first step: Show a mouse video snippets of sci-fi movies, sports, animation, and nature. A team at Baylor College of Medicine did just that, using a mouse engineered with a gene that makes its neurons glow when they're active. The researchers used a laser-powered microscope to record how individual cells in the animal's visual cortex lit up as they processed the images flashing by.
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After brain tissue analysis and the use of AI to trace all that microscopic wiring, the researchers estimated the wiring, if laid out, would measure more than 3 miles. Importantly, matching up all that anatomy with the activity in the mouse's brain as it watched movies allowed researchers to trace how the circuitry worked. The researchers also created digital 3D copies of the data that other scientists can use in developing new studies, which could eventually help find treatments for brain diseases. More here.
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