This webinar will present results from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (biccn.org) recently published in Science that describes the first draft of a brain-wide cell atlas of the adult human brain. Tools to visualize these data and for users to map their own data against will be described.

The incredible complexity of the human brain poses enormous challenges in understanding how the brain underlies our thoughts and behaviors, and what goes wrong in disease. Furthermore, the inaccessibility of the human brain necessitates the use of closely related model organisms to understand many aspects of brain structure and function that cannot be studied in human. New highly scalable technologies for studying individual cells on the basis of the genes they use are rapidly accelerating the field to create complete maps of the types of cells that make up the brain. These methods also allow mapping of homologous cell types across species to understand what can be studied in model organisms and what is unique about the human brain.