Scientists say they’ve analyzed trillions of bytes’ worth of mapping data from the brain of a mouse to trace the connections within a tangle of neurons that’s smaller than a pinhead.
The results, published today in the journal Nature, mark a preliminary step toward an even more ambitious neuron-mapping project called MICrONS.
“This is the culmination of a research program that began almost 10 years ago,” study co-author R. Clay Reid, senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in a news release. “Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring.”
