The big neuron
The encyclopedia of brain neurons will be created as part of an international project
Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow
The project, which was announced on March 31 by the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington, is called BigNeuron https://alleninstitute.org/bigneuron/overview / ("Big Neuron").
Its goal is to create a reliable and as accurate as possible three–dimensional reconstruction of the thousands of connections that each individual neuron forms. Modeling of these connections seems to be a key stage for a fundamental understanding of the mechanism of information encoding by the brain. "In our attempts to understand how the brain works, the fundamental task is to understand the function of neurons, and the shape of individual neurons plays a crucial role in this," quotes Allan Jones, executive director of the institute, which was created by Microsoft co–founder and philanthropist Paul Allen, an online publication news-medical.net (Allen Institute for Brain Science leads international effort to advance analysis of single neurons – VM).
The behavior of neurons depends on the shape, their geometry will help to understand how they process and transmit information through electrical and chemical signals, the publication notes. "We still don't even know how many classes of neurons there are in the brain," Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist from Columbia University in New York City, commented on the launch of the new project to the Nature News portal. A detailed description of individual neurons of different biological species, including fruit flies, aquarium fish danio, mice and humans, should appear in the future neural encyclopedia.
It cannot be said that no one has been engaged in the description of neurons until now. In particular, a Spanish doctor and histologist, one of the founders of modern neuroscience, Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal, studying brain cells under a microscope, discovered stellate and pyramidal neurons, which received their names due to the shape. But they reflect only a small part of the diversity among tens of millions of neurons in the mouse brain or tens of billions in humans.
The main difficulty in cataloging such a large number of neurons was to isolate a three-dimensional structure from a huge number of two-dimensional images obtained by microscopy. Neurons quickly change position, twist around themselves, overlap each other, and therefore it is quite difficult for both a person and a computer to catch the connections of each. Therefore, the first stage of the BigNeuron project will be the selection of algorithms to identify the characteristics of individual neurons. After that, the algorithms will be run on supercomputers. The project managers hope to receive an annotated database on the morphology of neurons by 2016.
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