The mammal brain is a complex network of billions of cells connected via trillions of nodes that neuroscientists have yet to tease apart. Now, researchers have mapped the many brain cells and connections in a portion of the mouse brain spanning just 1 cubic millimeter — roughly the size of a grain of sand.
“A millimeter seems small, but within that millimeter there are kilometers of wiring,” Jacob Reimer, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told Live Science. Reimer is the senior author of one of 10 new studies in which scientists detailed how they constructed this remarkable brain map.
Reimer is part of the MICrONS consortium, a team of more than 150 researchers from multiple U.S. institutions. In their series of papers published in Nature journals on April 9, the researchers not only unveiled the 3D neural map, called a “connectome,” but also described how they used this dataset to explore the brain’s workings.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/scientists-built-largest-brain-connectome-to-date-by-having-a-lab-mouse-watch-the-matrix-and-star-wars
