Just as the periodic table is foundational to chemistry and the Human Genome Project revolutionized modern genetics, researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have teamed up with Amazon Web Services
to create what could become a “transformative” new resource for the field of neuroscience.
AWS on Wednesday announced its technology will support the Allen Institute as it builds a map of the human brain, called the Brain Knowledge Platform. This platform, the first of its kind, is designed to be a complete reference of individual cells in the brain, and should eventually serve as the world’s largest open-source brain cell database.
To build the new platform, the Allen Institute is using single cell genomics technologies. Researchers measure the genes used by individual brain cells to create a “cell fingerprint,” and cells with similar fingerprints will be grouped into “cell types,” resulting in a high-resolution map of the entire brain.
