Today is an international A team of researchers has shared a highly detailed atlas of human brain cells that maps an astonishing variety of neurons. This atlas is huge package Of the 21 papers published in the journal science, each taking complementary approaches to the same overarching question: What types of cells are present in the brain? And what makes the human brain different from the brains of other animals?
With hundreds of billions of cells intertwined, mapping the entire brain is like trying to plot every star in the Milky Way. (The inner workings of each cell are its own little world.) But just as better telescopes make the universe clearer for astronomers, the analytical tools presented here can help It will provide scientists with “unprecedented resolution to view brain cells and open new windows for understanding,” said Andrea Becker, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative, which funded the Cell Atlas project. Michener said:
With a comprehensive map of cell types, it will be possible to understand how neurons function and how they malfunction in brain diseases. “This is a first step in defining the cellular complexity of the brain,” says Bing Ren, professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and principal investigator of the Atlas project. “The results were amazing.”
This isn’t the first brain cell atlas, and it won’t be the last. But it’s incredibly detailed. The 21 research collection reports the findings of his BICCN (BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network), the last five-year funding program of the BRAIN Initiative. NIH Assigned The $100 million effort aims to catalog brain cell types in greater detail than ever before. “The only other large-scale biology problem we’ve considered in this scope is the Human Genome Project,” says Beckelmichener. “The Cell Atlas Project is the largest team effort in neuroscience.”
Historically, understanding the complexity of the human brain has been nearly impossible. Ed Lane, a senior research fellow at the Allen Institute for Brain Science who helped lead the Atlas project, says there are so many interconnected parts that “it’s not really a single organ, it’s like 1,000 organs. It’s a thing.”
“Until this dataset came out, it was just a dataset. hypothesis “The brain was really complex,” added Amy Barnard, director of life sciences at the Kavli Foundation, who was not involved in the project. “Now we can see cellular diversity and address the problem.”
Neuroscientists often think of the brain in terms of connections between cells, like a wiring diagram. But the brain’s wiring tells us nothing about what its individual units are made of. To understand brain cell diversity, Lane says neuroscientists are borrowing tricks from the world of genomics.
