Reacción a "Published a detailed map of the connections between brain cells in mice"

This batch of articles is one of the most impressive results of the BRAIN initiative [Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies], which was launched by President Obama in 2013 and will last until 2030. In this case, they have used a technique called connectomics to reconstruct the circuits of the mouse cerebral cortex. It has taken almost a decade, but a consortium of laboratories has managed to use electron microscopy to map all the neuronal connections in small circuits of neurons whose activity had been measured. It is a tour de force with a wealth of results, which is like putting one of many bricks in a huge building to understand the brain.

It is worth remembering that more than a year ago another batch of impressive articles was published, mapping the cell types of the brain, which are the neurons that generate all these connections. This is another of the most impressive results to emerge from the US BRAIN project.

Now the big challenge is to bring these two strands of new science together; in other words, to understand which connections arise from which type of neuron. This will quite possibly require new techniques, such as the use of expansion optical microscopy, which allows us to do both at the same time. We now know how many types of cells there are and what the connections of all of them are like, but we need to map the connections of each type of neuron. This new form of microscopy has just been invented and I think it will go a long way.

My last comment is that these two large bodies of results, each of them worthy of a Nobel Prize in my humble opinion, have arisen not from the work of individual laboratories, but from large consortia. This is a new way of working in neuroscience and it is very similar to what happened over a decade ago in genetics with the sequencing of the human genome, and to what has been happening in physics, chemistry and astronomy for almost a century now. It is a revolution in neuroscience, not only because of the techniques or the results, but because of the way of working.