Tag: Allen Institute

The third time’s the charm for the Allen Institute for Brain Science’s 3-D atlas of the mouse brain.

Version 3 of the atlas, known as the Allen Mouse Brain Common Coordinate Framework or CCFv3, is the subject of a research paper published today in the journal Cell. It builds on a partial brain map that focused on the mouse cortex and was released in 2016.

Previous versions of the atlas were rendered with lower-resolution 3-D maps. The latest high-resolution maps are fine enough to pinpoint the locations of individual brain cells — which is crucial for interpreting datasets that contain thousands or millions of pieces of information.

“In the old days, people would define different regions of the brain by eye. As we get more and more data, that manual curation doesn’t scale anymore,” Lydia Ng, senior director of technology at the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, explained in a news release. “Just as we have a reference genome sequence, you need a reference anatomy.”

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Seattle’s Allen Institute is heading into a new phase of research into neuroscience — a phase that includes reorganizing its current activities as well as adding new ones.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science, which is the largest division under the institute’s umbrella, was established by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2003 and has continued on its mission since Allen’s death in 2018. It’s grown to more than 300 scientists and staff members who work in two broad research areas.

One program, known as Cell Types, focuses on mapping out a “periodic table” of brain cells. The Allen Institute’s new 16-year plan calls for the Allen Institute for Brain Science to focus solely on studying brain cell types and neural connectivity.

The second program, known as MindScope, seeks to understand how the brain’s neural circuits produce the sense of vision. That field of study, along with the Allen Brain Observatory, will transition out of the Allen Institute for Brain Science to become a separate program at the Allen Institute.

A new division, due for launch in 2022, will focus on research related to neural computation and dynamics.

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Researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science have captured the first-ever recording of electrical spikes from von Economo neurons — a rare kind of cell that’s found deep in the human brain and may be associated with social intelligence.

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For years, neuroscientists have been monitoring the brain activity of mice as they looked at a wide range of images — including the film-noir classic “Touch of Evil” — in hopes of discovering deep insights about the workings of the visual system. Now they’ve come upon a plot twist worthy of director Orson Welles himself.

The latest results, reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience by researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science and at the University of Washington, suggest that more than 90% of the neurons in the visual cortex don’t work the way scientists thought.

“We thought that there are simple principles according to which these neurons process visual information, and those principles are all in the textbooks,” Christof Koch, the brain institute’s chief scientist and president, said in a news release. ”But now that we can survey tens of thousands of cells at once, we get a more subtle — and much more complicated picture.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

“To me, that’s the business. In some sense, that’s the exciting thing,” Michael Buice, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute and one of the study’s lead authors, told GeekWire. “We’re in a more interesting place than we thought.”

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