Cell heavy! Develop edding a third-generation high-resolution map set of mouse brains!

June 2, 2020 /
BiovalleyBIOON / -- After three years of intensive data collection and careful mapping, the researchers' work was completedthe complex terrain they mapped, including all the mountains, canyons and boundaries, only half an inch long and weighed less than a gummies: the brains of laboratory micein a paper published in cell magazine, cartographers at the Allen Institute described this mapping feature -- the third iteration of the allen Mouse brain common coordinate framework, or CCFv3 (https://portal.brainmap.org/), a complete, high-resolution three-dimensional atlas of the mouse brainthe framework's creators say it will serve as a reference map in the field of neuroscienceRats are widely used in biomedical researchTheir brains contain about 100 million cells, each spread over hundreds of different regionsAs neuroscience data sets become larger and more complex, public spatial maps of the brain become more important, and the ability to place many different types of data precisely into a common 3-D space for comparison and association becomes increasingly importantthink of it as mobile GPS in the field of neuroscienceGPS (and new brain map) will tell you where you are, rather than manually searching for your location on a paper map based on what you see around youFor a dataset containing thousands of different pieces of information, a common set of coordination points -- and finding the corresponding brain landmarkfor those coordination points -- is criticalimage source: DrLydia Ng, co-author of the Cellstudy and senior technical director at the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences at the Allen Institute, said: "In the past, people used the eyes to define different areas of the brain As more and more data becomes available, manual management no longer works Just as we have a reference genome sequence, you need a reference anatomical data Dr Julie Harris, associate director of neuroanatomy at the Allen Institute of Brain Sciences, is another co-author of the study study of the entire brain whole brain CCFv3 builds on a partial version released in 2016 that maps the entire cortex of the outermost part of the mouse brain The previous atlas was a lower-resolution 3-D map, while CCFv3 had a high enough resolution to pinpoint the location of individual cells The latest full-brain map has been open to the public since late 2017, and several different neuroscience teams have begun using it Dr Nick Steinmetz, an assistant professor at the University of Washington and a leader at the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences, used the map in a recent study that looked at neuronal activity in mice when selecting different images seen in laboratory tests The study used neural pixels, a tiny electronic probe that simultaneously captures the activity of hundreds of neurons that span several different brain regions Steinmetz said that when they analyzed the data, it was clear that the brain was involved in more visual choices than they had realized before They have to have a big picture view, and CCFv3 helps them see all the results together "The atlas is a very necessary resource that supports the idea of doing research at the brain level," said Steinmetz When you record hundreds of parts of the brain, a new scale of investigation is introduced You have to have a greater view of all the sites, and CCF makes this possible "
an evolving atlas
to make the atlas, the researchers broke down the brain into tiny virtual 3-D blocks, called carnomes, and assigned a unique coordinate to each block Data from the 3-D model comes from the average brain anatomy of nearly 1,700 different animals The team then assigned each individual to hundreds of different known regions of the mouse brain, carefully drawing boundaries between them The data set provided to the atlas comes from several different types of experiments conducted at the Allen Institute over the past few years, the researchers said The atlas contains different types of data, which makes it unique in the reference brain map set Historically, brain atlases have been drawn in 2-D, looking at the brain from different depths and arranging them For some types of data, this form of brain map works well But for modern neuroscience studies that look at neuronal activity or cell characteristics throughout the brain, the 3D atlas provides a better context image source: Allen Institute for Brain Science
researchers say future atlas updates could rely on machine learning or other forms of automation, rather than labor-intensive manual management as the current version "As we now know, atlases should be evolving life resources, because as we learn more about how the brain is organized, we'll need to update," said Harris Building an atlas in an automatic, unbiased way is where the area of atlas may change (biovalleyBioon.com) References: A new high-resolution, 3-D map of the whole mouse brain
Cell, Wang, Ding, and Li et al.: "The Allen Mouse Brain Common Framework: A 3D Reference Atlas" DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.04.007