What happens when a group of scientists cut 1,700 mice brains into 140 slices each? Do you even want to know?
The experiment may turn your stomach. But the result should amaze you. It’s a roadmap called the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas. The scientists collected 1.8 petabytes of data from the mouse brains. That’s as much as 23.9 years of HD video!
The images are available to the public at http://www.brain-map.org/. They show the connections between a mammal’s brain cells. It’s more detail than the world has ever seen. Scientists hope the mapping will give insight into the human brain.
The common house mouse might not seem very bright. But it’s packing some serious brain cells. Seventy-five million, or thereabouts. The human brain has many more: 100 billion. Those cells contain everything that makes you, YOU. The mouse and human brain have similar constructions. That’s why the roadmap to a mouse’s brain helps as a roadmap to a human brain. The new diagram doesn’t show every connection between the mouse’s brain cells, much less a human’s. But it does show how major parts of the brain connect.
Biology professor and Medical Institute Investigator David Anderson says, "The Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas provides an initial roadmap of the brain, at the level of interstate highways and the major cities that they link.” But researchers plan to zoom in further. The next step, says Anderson, will be individual intersections.
Your brain has more neurons (nerve cells) than the Milky Way has stars. “Who you are—all your thoughts and actions your entire life—is based on connections between neurons,” says Neurobiology professor Ed Callaway. “So if we want to understand any of these processes or how they go wrong in disease, we have to understand how those circuits function. Without an atlas, we couldn’t hope to gain that understanding.”
Sounds like a good first step.
