The human brain contains around 100 billion cell-to-cell connections. It is, therefore, clearly important to know the network’s connections and finding all of those connections is the aim of connectomics. How thoughts and feelings arise from the activity of individual cells and what happens when cells disconnect from the network through degenerative diseases, for example, is still unclear. Anatomy, chemistry, physiology and cell biology in healthy as well as in sick brains has since been extensively explored. The mapping of a whole mouse brain now seems within reach, but even if the equipment work as designed alone the collection of the data will take several years, and the analysis of the approximately 40 petabytes of data may take decades.Ī lot has happened since scientists in the late 19th century first started examining nerve cells under the microscope. With the development of a special staining method, Shawn Mikula and Winfried Denk and of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have now closed one of the last methodological gaps: How to stain an entire brain. Scientists have therefore long been dreaming of mapping and then decoding the connectome, the circuit diagram of the brain. The knowing which nerve cells is connected to which other nerve cell would considerably help us to understand how the brain works. Learning, it is widely believed is based on changes in the connections between nerve cells. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have developed a special staining method that brings the reconstruction of all nerve cells and their connections within reach. A new staining method closes one of the last methodological gaps: Now it’s possible to map every nerve cell and its synapses in a mouse brain.
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