Researchers say they’ve accomplished a feat that was said to be impossible 46 years ago: mapping the cells in a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and tracing their activity.
The achievement, documented today in a set of research papers published by the Nature family of journals, is being compared to the Apollo moon shots that were launched more than 50 years ago, and to drafts of the human genome that were released more than 20 years ago.
Scientists from Seattle’s Allen Institute played a key role in the $100 million effort known as the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program, or MICrONS. More than 150 researchers worked together through MICrONS to create a detailed 3D map of a cubic millimeter taken from a mouse’s brain — and figure out how the 200,000 brain cells in a speck the size of a grain of sand work together.
“It really has been one of the holy grails of the field from the beginning,” Clay Reid, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute, told me. “There are many thousands of neuroscientists who study the cerebral cortex, and pretty much everyone who studies the cerebral cortex would like to be able to know what are the sources of inputs to any given cell within the cortex, and what are the outputs of that cell. That’s what such a complete data set allows one to study.”
