11-04-2025
Scientists map miles of wiring in mouse brain
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Scientists Wednesday unveiled a functional 3-D map of the 84,000 neurons in a cubic millimeter of a mouse's brain, along with more than three miles of microscopic wiring — axons and smaller dendrites — and 523 million synapses connecting them.
The massive dataset, published in the journal Nature, and color-coded rendering of how each neuron communicates, mark a big "step toward unraveling the mystery of how our brains work," The Associated Press said.
The mouse brain map — created by a team of 150 researchers with the federally funded MICrONS project, primarily at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Princeton and Baylor College of Medicine — seeks to discover how neurons interact to make us "think, feel, see, talk and move," the AP said. One hope is to "eventually find treatments for brain diseases" like Alzheimer's.
The project discovered "patterns in the wiring of the brain that had escaped notice until now," The New York Times said. Brains are extremely complex, and "finding wiring rules is a win," said Harvard biophysicist Mariela Petkova. "The brain is a lot less messy than people thought."
The MICrONS project's next goal is mapping an entire mouse brain, a task that "would take decades" with "current methods," the Times said. But given the "milestone" advances made in charting the poppyseed-sized granule, "it's totally doable," said University of Vermont neuroscientist Davi Bock, who was not involved in the study, "and I think it's worth doing."
