Latest news with #MICrONS
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Largest Brain Map May Have Just Changed Neuroscience
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." A new package of papers examines the largest map yet of mammalian brain tissue. The map shows one cubic millimeter worth of neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse. Many brain functions, particularly the senses, are similar across different mammal species. Scientists have mapped an unprecedentedly large portion of the brain of a mouse. The cubic millimeter worth of brain tissue represents the largest piece of a brain we've ever understood to this degree, and the researchers behind this project say that the mouse brain is similar enough to the human brain that they can even extrapolate things about us. A cubic millimeter sounds tiny—to us, it is tiny—but a map of 200,000 brain cells represents just over a quarter of a percent of the mouse brain. In brain science terms, that's extraordinarily high. A proportionate sample of the human brain would be 240 million cells. Within the sciences, coding and computer science can sometimes overshadow the physical and life sciences. Rhetoric about artificial intelligence has raced ahead with terms like 'human intelligence,' but the human brain is not well enough understood to truly give credence to that idea. Scientists have worked for decades to analyze the brain, and they're making great progress despite the outsized rhetoric working against them. That said, artificial intelligence designed for specific tasks is essential to research like this. In a series of eight papers in the peer reviewed journal Nature, the team behind the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) project—hailing from the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, and Princeton University—described how they used machine learning to 'reverse engineer the algorithms of the brain.' The field in which scientists map the brain and other parts of the nervous system (of humans or any other creature) is called connectomics. The term comes from the same suffix as in biome or genome, referring to a complete picture or map of something. This work expands on the connectome—which is only the physical map—by adding data about each neuron's function. In one of the team's papers, the researchers were able to make an overall classifying system to cover 30,000 neurons by their different shapes, or morphologies. These neurons are excitatory, meaning they're involved with transmitting messages in the brain. The alternative to excitatory is inhibitory, which is circuitry that stops a message from being passed, like an insulator. Inhibitory neuron shapes are better understood, partly because their shapes can be separated into diverse (but discrete) groups. In this study, scientists used machine learning to help classify excitatory neurons, which seem to need a more complicated classifying system. By turning the neurons into measurements, observations,and layers, the scientists could then use statistical methods to find how often certain types or qualities of these cells appeared. This may sound like an oxymoron, but code can generalize more precisely than human scientists are able to. '(1) Superficial L2/3 neurons are wider than deep ones; (2) L4 neurons in V1 are less tufted than those in HVAs; (3) the basal dendrites of a subset of atufted L4 neurons in V1 avoid reaching into L5; (4) excitatory cortical neurons form mostly a continuum with respect to dendritic morphology, with some notable exceptions.' The conclusion about a continuum is really important. Having categories for neurons can be and has been useful in studying the brain, but computing power can deepen this understanding and add a great deal of nuance. With more information, we can turn broad types into something more individualized. Another paper in the set found confirmation of an existing theory that 'like connects like' within neuron structures. Neurons that perform certain tasks in the visual cortex of the mouse brain reach out and link up with each other, whether they're adjacent or layers apart. Because of the size of this dataset, the scientists were able to extend this established theory into further-away parts of the brain region. And since even this large mapping of brain tissue is still very incomplete, the number of 'like' neurons is likely even higher in reality. The data and maps from this project are available for the public to check out by following the instructions on their website. It's wild that you don't even have to download anything—you can map the brain using your web browser. You Might Also Like Can Apple Cider Vinegar Lead to Weight Loss? Bobbi Brown Shares Her Top Face-Transforming Makeup Tips for Women Over 50
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Single Cubic Millimeter of Brain Tissue May Have Just Changed Neuroscience Forever
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." A new package of papers examines the largest map yet of mammalian brain tissue. The map shows one cubic millimeter worth of neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse. Many brain functions, particularly the senses, are similar across different mammal species. Scientists have mapped an unprecedentedly large portion of the brain of a mouse. The cubic millimeter worth of brain tissue represents the largest piece of a brain we've ever understood to this degree, and the researchers behind this project say that the mouse brain is similar enough to the human brain that they can even extrapolate things about us. A cubic millimeter sounds tiny—to us, it is tiny—but a map of 200,000 brain cells represents just over a quarter of a percent of the mouse brain. In brain science terms, that's extraordinarily high. A proportionate sample of the human brain would be 240 million cells. Within the sciences, coding and computer science can sometimes overshadow the physical and life sciences. Rhetoric about artificial intelligence has raced ahead with terms like 'human intelligence,' but the human brain is not well enough understood to truly give credence to that idea. Scientists have worked for decades to analyze the brain, and they're making great progress despite the outsized rhetoric working against them. That said, artificial intelligence designed for specific tasks is essential to research like this. In a series of eight papers in the peer reviewed journal Nature, the team behind the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) project—hailing from the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, and Princeton University—described how they used machine learning to 'reverse engineer the algorithms of the brain.' The field in which scientists map the brain and other parts of the nervous system (of humans or any other creature) is called connectomics. The term comes from the same suffix as in biome or genome, referring to a complete picture or map of something. This work expands on the connectome—which is only the physical map—by adding data about each neuron's function. In one of the team's papers, the researchers were able to make an overall classifying system to cover 30,000 neurons by their different shapes, or morphologies. These neurons are excitatory, meaning they're involved with transmitting messages in the brain. The alternative to excitatory is inhibitory, which is circuitry that stops a message from being passed, like an insulator. Inhibitory neuron shapes are better understood, partly because their shapes can be separated into diverse (but discrete) groups. In this study, scientists used machine learning to help classify excitatory neurons, which seem to need a more complicated classifying system. By turning the neurons into measurements, observations,and layers, the scientists could then use statistical methods to find how often certain types or qualities of these cells appeared. This may sound like an oxymoron, but code can generalize more precisely than human scientists are able to. '(1) Superficial L2/3 neurons are wider than deep ones; (2) L4 neurons in V1 are less tufted than those in HVAs; (3) the basal dendrites of a subset of atufted L4 neurons in V1 avoid reaching into L5; (4) excitatory cortical neurons form mostly a continuum with respect to dendritic morphology, with some notable exceptions.' The conclusion about a continuum is really important. Having categories for neurons can be and has been useful in studying the brain, but computing power can deepen this understanding and add a great deal of nuance. With more information, we can turn broad types into something more individualized. Another paper in the set found confirmation of an existing theory that 'like connects like' within neuron structures. Neurons that perform certain tasks in the visual cortex of the mouse brain reach out and link up with each other, whether they're adjacent or layers apart. Because of the size of this dataset, the scientists were able to extend this established theory into further-away parts of the brain region. And since even this large mapping of brain tissue is still very incomplete, the number of 'like' neurons is likely even higher in reality. The data and maps from this project are available for the public to check out by following the instructions on their website. It's wild that you don't even have to download anything—you can map the brain using your web browser. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists reveal advance in brain research once thought impossible
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Using a speck of mouse brain matter the size of a grain of sand, scientists have created the first precise, three-dimensional map of a mammal's brain. The map details the form, function and activity of 84,000 neurons, branched structures that fire off messages down a long arm, called an axon, and then through more than 500 million synapses, as well as 200,000 brain cells. The tiny piece of tissue contained 3.4 miles (5.4 kilometers) of neuronal wiring — nearly one and a half times the length of New York City's Central Park. The work is the culmination of almost a decade of research by 150 scientists at 22 institutions led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Baylor College of Medicine and Princeton University. 'One byproduct of this whole project shows us just how incredibly beautiful the brain is,' said Dr. Forrest Collman, associate director of data and technology at the Allen Institute, in a video shared by the organization. 'Just looking at these neurons shows you their detail and scale in a way that makes you appreciate the brain with a sense of awe in the way that when you look up, you know, say, at a picture of a galaxy far, far away,' he added. The astonishing map represents only 1/500 of the full volume of a mouse's brain yet the team ended up with 1.6 petabytes of data — a staggering amount equivalent to 22 years of nonstop HD video, which the project, known as The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, has already made publicly available. Researchers described the work in several papers published in the journal Nature on April 9. To make the map, scientists at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston began by using specialized microscopes to record the brain activity in a 1-cubic-millimeter portion of tissue in a lab mouse's visual cortex — where the animal processes what it sees — over the course of a few days. The researchers made sure the mouse was awake and visually stimulated during the imaging by having the animal run on a treadmill and watch 10-second scenes from various movies, including 'The Matrix' and 'Mad Max: Fury Road.' YouTube clips of extreme sports such as motocross, luge and BASE jumping were also part of the viewing rotation, according to a Princeton University news release. Next, after euthanizing the mouse, researchers from the Allen Institute in Seattle took that same cubic millimeter of brain and sliced it into more than 28,000 layers, each 1/400 the width of a human hair, and took images of each slice along the way. They then reconstructed the images into a composite. 'That took us about 12 days and 12 nights with the team taking shifts around the clock; not because we were cutting it by hand, it's a machine that is automated,' said Dr. Nuno Maçarico da Costa, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute. 'We needed to be there to stop at any point in time if we thought we're going to lose more than a section in a row.' If that happened, da Costa said the experiment would have to start from scratch, adding that the whole process was very 'stressful.' A team at Princeton University in New Jersey subsequently deployed machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to trace the contour of every neuron through the slices, coloring the neurons to illuminate them individually in a process called segmentation. The AI-generated information is validated or proofread by the scientists involved, a process that is still ongoing. The work has culminated in a unified view of what scientists are calling the mouse brain 'connectome' that shows how specific parts of the mouse brain are organized and offers insight into how different cell types work together. 'The connectome is the beginning of the digital transformation of brain science,' said Dr. Sebastian Seung, Princeton University's Evnin Professor in Neuroscience and a professor of computer science. 'With a few keystrokes you can search for information and get the results in seconds. Some of that information would have taken a whole Ph.D. thesis to get before. And that's the power of digital transformation,' he said in a news release. Mapping the brain in this way had long been thought an impossible challenge. Molecular biologist Francis Crick, who won the Nobel prize for describing the structure of DNA, suggested neuroscientists would never be able to achieve such a detailed understanding of the brain. 'It is no use asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing,' he wrote in Scientific American in 1979. The mouse brain 'connectome' builds on similar work on even smaller creatures: The connectome of the nematode worm C. elegans was completed in 2019, and scientists revealed a map of all the fruit fly brain neurons in 2024. One cubic millimeter of mouse brain is about 20 times bigger than the complete fruit fly brain, and much more complex, the researchers said. Nonetheless, the goal is to be able to map the entire mice brain connectome in the near future. 'I think right now the answer is no, it is not feasible, but I think everyone has really clear ideas about how they could break through those barriers. We're hoping in three or four years, we can say, yes, it is possible,' Collman told CNN. However, he said mapping the human brain connectome in similar synaptic resolution would be a dramatically more difficult endeavor. 'The human brain is another factor of 1,500 or so larger than a mouse brain, and so that brings a whole host … of technical and ethical barriers to doing that,' he said. However, it might be possible to trace axons throughout the human brain, if not synaptic connections, added Dr. Clay Reid, a senior investigator in brain science at the Allen Institute. 'The prospect of reconstructing the entire human brain at the level of all of the connections, that's something for the distant future.' The neocortex is particularly interesting to study, because this region of the brain is what distinguishes mammal brains from those of other vertebrates, said Dr. Mariela Petkova, a research associate, and Dr. Gregor Schuhknecht, a postdoctoral fellow, both in the department of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. Petkova and Schuhknecht weren't involved in the creation of the mouse brain map. 'The researchers focused on this region because it is generally considered to be the seat of higher cognition and plays a key part in sensory perception, language processing, planning and decision-making,' they wrote in an article published alongside the research. 'Remarkably, these seemingly different functions are made possible by a blueprint that can be found, with some modifications, in all cortical areas and in all mammals.' Lab mice are already widely used to understand human diseases, and a better comprehension of the mouse brain's form and function will present new possibilities for studying human brain disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, autism and schizophrenia that involve disruptions in neural communication. 'If you have a broken radio and you have the circuit diagram, you'll be in a better position to fix it,' da Costa said in a news release. 'We are describing a kind of Google map or blueprint of this grain of sand. In the future, we can use this to compare the brain wiring in a healthy mouse to the brain wiring in a model of disease.'
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists map miles of wiring in mouse brain
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. 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."
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Scientists believe this mouse brain map is the next Human Genome Project
Scientists have achieved a feat once believed impossible, constructing the largest functional map of a brain to date, which they believe could eventually lead to the discovery of medications for hard-to-treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Using a piece of a mouse's brain no larger than a grain of sand, scientists from across three institutions created a detailed diagram of the wiring that connects neurons as they send messages through the brain. The project, called Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS), offers unprecedented insight into the brain's function and organization that could help unlock the secrets of intelligence. David Markowitz, a scientist who helped coordinate the project, said the data, published April 9 in the journal Nature marks 'a watershed moment for neuroscience, comparable to the Human Genome Project in their transformative potential.' In the study, scientists looked at a small piece of the mouse's brain called the neocortex, which receives and processes visual information. It's the newest part of the brain in terms of evolution, and differentiates the brains of mammals from other animals, according to researchers. A team of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston started by recording brain activity in a portion of the mouse's visual cortex roughly the size of a grain of salt while it watched a series of YouTube clips and movies. Scientists at the Allen Institute, a research center in Seattle, then sliced that piece of the mouse's brain into more than 25,000 layers, each a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair, and took high resolution photos of the slices through microscopes. The material was sent to a team at Princeton University, in New Jersey, which used artificial intelligence to reconstruct the pieces in 3D. Other scientists compared their approach to understanding a car's combustion engine. 'Just as an engine is composed of pistons, cylinders and a fuel system, the brain consists of neurons and synapses – the tiny, specialized connections at which neurons communicate,' two Harvard researchers wrote in a companion piece to the Nature article. The data set from the research contains 84,000 neurons, 500 million synapses and neuronal wiring that could extend the length of New York's Central Park nearly one and a half times, molecular biologists Mariela Petkova and Gregor Schuhknecht wrote. Findings from the studies have led to discoveries of new cell types, characteristics and ways to classify cells, researchers said. The achievement also puts scientists closer to their larger goal of mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse. 'Inside that tiny speck is an entire architecture like an exquisite forest,' Clay Reid, a senior investigator who helped pioneer this area of study, said in a statement. 'It has all sorts of rules of connections that we knew from various parts of neuroscience, and within the reconstruction itself, we can test the old theories and hope to find new things that no one has ever seen before.' Researchers view wiring diagrams as a foundational step that scientists can build on and, eventually, potentially use to find treatments for brain conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and schizophrenia. They compare the studies to the Human Genome Project, which created the first complete map of the DNA in every human cell. The Human Genome Project has led to profound advances in drug discovery, treatments and disease screenings and helped pave the way for revolutionary gene therapies to treat certain diseases, including some cancers. With a functional map of the brain, researchers say they now have the ability to understand the brain's form and function and have opened up new pathways to study intelligence. Nuno da Costa, an associate investigator at the Allen Institute, described the data they collected as a 'kind of Google map' of the piece of the visual cortex. 'If you have a broken radio and you have the circuit diagram, you'll be in a better position to fix it,' he said in a statement. 'In the future, we can use this to compare the brain wiring in a healthy mouse to the brain wiring in a model of disease.' This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A mouse watched YouTube. Then scientists mapped its brains.
