Nine years. A technique involving eight tiny electrodes. More than 1,700 connections between neurons assessed and characterized.
A team of neuroscientists at the Allen Institute has completed an incredibly ambitious undertaking to catalog the chemical connections, or synapses, between thousands of neurons in mouse and human brains.
The result: a much more complete picture of the diversity of mammalian synapses, the routes by which information is passed from neuron to neuron in the brain. The team published a study describing their results in the journal Science today and released their synapse data publicly online.
“At the Allen Institute, we spend a lot of time thinking about all the different types of cells in the brain. This project looked at those different cell types and asked which ones are connected to each other and what those connections look like,” said Luke Campagnola, Ph.D., a scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, who led the study together with scientist Stephanie Seeman, Ph.D., and Tim Jarsky, Ph.D., Associate Director of Electrophysiology. “It’s a huge cataloging project with the idea that the more we know about the structure of the brain, the more likely we are to be able to understand it in the future.”
