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Scientists have created the first exact, three -dimensional map of the brain of a mammalian the first precise, three -dimensional map of a mammal.
The cards describe the shape, function and activity of 84,000 neurons, branched structures that fire messages in a long arm, referred to as axon, and then by more than 500 million synapses and 200,000 brain cells. The tiny piece of fabric contained neural cabling of 3.4 miles (almost a one and a half times as long as the Central Park in New York.
Work is the highlight of almost a decade of research of 150 scientists at 22 institutions that are led by all institutes for Brain Science, the Baylor College of Medicine and Princeton University.
“A by -product of this entire project shows us how incredibly beautiful the brain is,” said Dr. Forrest Collman, deputy director of data and technology at all institutes, in a video shared by the organization.
“If you only look at these neurons, show you your detail and your scaling in a way that you let the brain appreciate with a feeling of awe in the way that you know, for example,” when you look up, “he added.
The astonishing card is only 1/500 of the entire volume of the brain of a mouse, but the team has 1.6 petabyte data -an amazing amount that corresponds to 22 years Nonstop -hd video, which has already made the project, which is known as machine intelligence from cortical networks (microns), publicly available.
The researchers described the work in several works published on April 9 in the Nature magazine.
Dr. Clay Reid (right), a senior investigator at the all institutes for Brain Science, and the doctoral student at the University of Washington, Leila Elabbady, examines data from the micronon project. – with the kind permission of all institutes
Build brain activity
In order to create the card, the scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston started with specialized microscopes to brain activity in a 1-cubic millimeter part of the tissue in a visual cortex of a laboratory out of which the animal processes, which it sees, during a few days.
The researchers ensured that the mouse was awake and visually stimulated during imaging by raning the animal on a treadmill and watching 10 second-second scenes from different films, including “The Matrix” and “Mad Max Road”. According to a Princeton University press, YouTube clips of extreme sports such as motocross, rusuge and base -jump were also part of the visual.
Next, researchers of the all institutes in Seattle took the same cubic mill brain in more than 28,000 layers, 1/400 each with the width of a human hair, and took pictures of each piece after the same cubic millimeter of the brain. Then they reconstructed the pictures into a network.
“That took about 12 days and 12 nights, with the team taking the layer around the clock; not because we cut it by hand, it is a machine that is automated,” said Dr. Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Associate Investigator at all institutes.
“We had to be there to stop at a certain point in time when we thought we would lose more than one section in a row.” In this case, da Costa said that the experiment had to start over and added that the entire process was very “stressful”.
A team from Princeton University in New Jersey then stopped machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to pursue the contour of each neuron through the windows, and colored the neurons in order to be referred to as segmentation individually in a process. The ai-generated information is validated or corrected by the scientists involved, a process that has not yet been completed.
In a uniform view of the Maus brain, the work culminates as a “connectome”, which shows how certain parts of the mouse brain are organized and offer insights into the cooperation with different cell types.
“The Connectome is the beginning of the digital transformation of brain science,” said Dr. Sebastian Seung, Evnin professor at Princeton University in neurosciences and professor of computer science.
“With a few key attacks, you can search for information and receive the results in seconds. Some of this information would have accepted a whole doctoral thesis to get beforehand. And that is the power of digital transformation,” he said in a press release.
Dr. Nuno Maçarico da Costa, Associate Investigator at all Institute for Brain Science, works in electron microscopy laboratory. – with the kind permission of all institutes
Impossible challenge?
The mapping of the brain in this way has long been an impossible challenge. The molecular biologist Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for the description of the structure of the DNA, suggested that neuroscientists would never be able to achieve such a detailed understanding of the brain.
“It is not used to ask the impossible, such as the exact circuit diagram for a cubic millimeter brain tissue and the way all of his neurons shoot,” he wrote in 1979 in Scientific American.
The “Connectoma” of the mouse brirn builds on similar work on even smaller creatures: The Connectomes of the Nematoden Wurmers C. Elegans was completed in 2019, and scientists showed a map of all fruit fly brain neurons in 2024.
A cubic millimeter of the mouse brain is about 20 -larger than the Complete Fruit Fly brain and much more complex, according to the researchers. Nevertheless, the goal is to map the entire mouse brain Connectoma in the near future.
“I think the answer is no at the moment, it is not feasible, but I think everyone has really clear ideas about how they could break through these barriers. We hope in three or four years, we can say, yes, it is possible,” Collman told CNN.
However, he said that the assignment of the human brain in a similar synaptic resolution would be a more dramatically difficult undertaking. “The human brain is another factor of 1,500 greater than a mouse brain, and so it brings an entire host … technical and ethical obstacles,” he said.
However, it could be possible to pursue axons throughout the human brain, if not synaptic connections, added Dr. Clay Reid, a senior researcher in brain science at all institutes.
“The view of reconstructing the entire human brain at the level of all connections is something for the distant future.”
A new way of studying Alzheimer’s
The neocortex is particularly interesting to examine because this region of the brain distinguishes mammalian brain from those of other vertebrates, said Dr. Mariela Petkova, a research assistant, and Dr. Gregor Schuhknecht, a postdoctoral, both in the department for molecular and cell biology at Harvard University. Petkova and Schuhknecht were not involved in the creation of the mouse brain map.
“The researchers concentrated on this region because it is generally regarded as a seat of a higher perception and plays an important role in sensory perception, language processing, planning and decision -making,” they wrote in an article that was published alongside research.
This representation of the 3D card display contains more than 500 million synapses.
“Remarkably, these apparently different functions are made possible by a blueprint, which can be found with some modifications in all cortical areas and in all mammals.”
Laboratory caves are already widespread to understand human diseases, and a better understanding of the form and function of the mouse brain will be new possibilities for the investigation of human brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and schizophrenia, which contain disorders in neural communication.
“If you have a broken radio and have the circuit diagram, you are in a better position to fix it,” said Costa in a press release. “We describe a kind of Google card or blueprint of this grain. In the future we can use this to compare the brain cabling in a healthy mouse with the brain wiring in a disease model.”
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