Mapping a mice’s brain isn’t much right? Just find a mouse, kill it, and map out the brain! But it’s much harder than it sounds: “‘In the old days, people would define different regions of the brain by eye. As we get more and more data, that manual curation doesn’t scale anymore,’ Lydia Ng, an Allen Institute researcher and senior author of the Cell paper, said.” Allen Institute is a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to neuroscience. Mice are incredibly small, and they do carry diseases. Why can it be such a big discovery, though – I mean, what makes it significant? Well, the brain of a mouse is very similar to the brain of a human: “Their brains have fairly similar structures to humans, they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already developed robust understandings of how their brains work.”
