Desentrañan las conexiones nerviosas del cerebro del ratón.

Scientists trace a wiring plan for entire mouse brain


The first images from a project that has set out to map the whole mouse brain are now publicly available.
Saswato R. Das 22 June 2012

El presente trabajo, publicado en "Scientific American" y reseñado een "Nature", es un hito significativo en el conocimiento del sistema nervioso centrasl (SNC) de los vertebrados. El ratón albino es un modelo común para los científicos por lo que desentrañar las conexiones cerebrales resulta fundamental.

The first images from a project to map the mouse brain have been released.
P. Mitra et al / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

One of the items high on the big science project to-do list is to devise a wiring diagram for the human brain. Its 100 billion neurons and the hundreds of trillions of connections among these cells consign this goal and the specifics of achieving it to the long-term bin. A first step, though, is a complete diagram of the mouse brain.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, N.Y., have started making public detailed images of mouse brain circuitry, releasing on June 1 the first installment of about 500 terabytes. The goal of the effort, called the Mouse Brain Architecture Project (MBA), is an entire rodent brain wiring plan that would represent the first such mapping of the circuits of a vertebrate brain.
"Current knowledge of brain circuitry is incomplete," says Jonathan Pollock, chief of genetics and molecular neurobiology research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "The lack of knowledge about neural circuitry has led to recognition by the scientific community of the need map the brain at the macro-, meso- and microscopic scale." (Consultar el articulo en "Nature").