First Images From Complete Map of Mouse Brain
The Mouse Brain Architecture Project Tiny cross-sections of mice brains combine into a high-resolution, 3-D photo. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Despite plenty of advances in neuroscience, often what we know about the brain comes with gaps, and anything close to a full piece of knowledge always ends up lacking something - whether it's for the human brain or a mouse's. Researchers from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory are starting to remedy that - the mouse version, at least - by developing a full, 3-D, virtual map of a vertebrate brain. Now they've let the public in on the first chapter of the research: 500 terabytes of mouse brain. The 3-D image is actually several cross-sections of different brains, each made up from slices of mice brains from a similar demographic (age, gender, etc.) and overlaid to let a viewer zoom in on a specific point and follow individual neuropathways. Each...