In the article, “Gigantic new 3D map traces every neuron in a tiny mouse brain,” it talks about seeing every brain cell in mice. Over the years, researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have been recording every brain cell and connections between the neurons in mice. There has been a lot of progress since the map they released back in 2016. The complete map that was published on May 7, 2020 includes about 100 million brain cells. The project is mostly aiming to create a mouse brain that all researchers working on mice can use as a reference.
In the older days, people used to define different parts of the brain by using their eyes. Now, because we have way more data than in the past, we don’t do that anymore. Nowadays, researchers typically trace connections between brain cells using this slices of tissues that can be seen layer by layer. To build a 3D map, the team broke broke the mouse brain into voxels, or 3D pixels, and then mapped the cells and connections with every voxel. They then made a 3D map and published it.
Mice are common model organisms in neuroscience. Their brains have similar structures to humans’, they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already gotten good understanding of how their brains work. In doing so, neuroscientists will have a tool to develop new research programs and accelerate research that is already underway.