The mapping of a tiny piece of mouse mind opens an unexplored path to grasp human intelligence | Health and effectively -being | EUROtoday

The mapping of a tiny piece of the mind of a mouse, only a cubic millimeter of its cerebral cortex, has been sufficient to undertake a path by no means earlier than explored in direction of the understanding of the human thoughts. An worldwide consortium has managed to map, with an unprecedented stage of element, all neuronal wiring and the way mind cells are activated in that mammal organ. The data collected, which entails the mapping of the most important mind to this point, will assist unravel the complicated neural networks behind cognition and habits. The analysis is signing the Microns challenge (synthetic intelligence from cortical networks), thought of probably the most complicated neuroscience experiment ever tried. The first findings have been printed this Wednesday within the journal Nature.

The analyzed mind cache will not be bigger than a grain of sand, however comprises about 200,000 cells, 500 million synapses – connections between neurons – and greater than 4 kilometers of neuronal wiring. “Within that tiny particle is an architecture, such as an exquisite forest. It contains all kinds of connection rules that we knew from various areas of neuroscience, and within the reconstruction itself, we can prove the old theories and expect to find new things that no one had seen before,” says Clay Reid, neuroscientist of the Allen Institute of Seattle mind sciences (United States) and the primary researcher of this challenge.

Each thought, each reminiscence, each motion that one performs on a day -to -day foundation originates within the exercise of neurons within the mind. In that convoluted and enigmatic operations middle that retains human essence. Understand the way it works, how all neuronal networks function and relate, how the operate of every of them in that mind structure suits, is likely one of the best challenges that the scientific neighborhood has forward. “Our intelligence and our mind are expressions of the physical structure of our brain. By understanding this structure, we can delimit and better mold the hypotheses about how intelligence in our brain is implemented,” he displays, in an response by e mail, Nuno da Costa, a scientist on the Allen Institute and co -author of this analysis.

The mind wiring in different less complicated animal fashions, such because the fruit fly larva (simply over 3,000 neurons and about 550,000 synapses) or the grownup mind of this similar animal (140,000 neurons and 50 million synapses), has already been efficiently mapped. But study, with such a stage of element, that tiny a part of the mind of the mouse (which is a a lot decrease fraction of the human mind) transcends, in line with scientists, all recognized technological limits of the connectomic discipline, which is the self-discipline that maps and describes neural connections. If, the one comparable factor, two researchers at Harvard University bear in mind in a hooked up “Together, these two projects [el mapeo de trozo de cerebro de ratón y el del paciente con epilepsia] They define the current technological border of large -scale mammal connectomics, ”they contextualize.

Costa says that when they began their investigation, obtain images of a cubic millimeter of brain tissue with this level of detail, “far exceeded” what was achieved to date. The experiment was, he says, “extraordinarily formidable.” “The scale and backbone of this information set far past neurons. It consists of all blood vessels, non -neuronal cells similar to glia and even the organelles inside particular person cells,” he abounds.

And it sets a visual example of what was achieved by profileing all these neural networks in the piece of mouse brain: “Imagine a kind of Google Maps for the brain: not only will it show the main highways, but also every street, each house, every room inside each house, and even every door and window. Just like people use Google Maps to determine the best route from point to point B, or even to check if there is a route, this type of Detailed brain map allows scientists to see if two neurons are connected and exactly where these connections are produced. ”

The region that makes us human

The volume studied is far from the dimensions and complexity of a human brain, but the data that this mapping yields are more extrapolable than it might seem. The choice to analyze a concrete region, such as the cerebral cortex, for example, is not trivial, explains Da Costa: “This brain region is possibly the most crucial structure that defines us as humans, largely due to its important expansion in our brain. When studying how the cerebral cortex works in the mouse brain, we can generate better ideas and hypothesis about how our own brain works”.

In the hooked up remark, the 2 Harvard researchers abound in it: that mind area is taken into account “the headquarters of the superior cognition”, a key territory for sensory notion, language processing or determination making. They are apparently very totally different capabilities, however potential due to a type of sample that’s discovered, with some modifications, in all cortical areas and in all mammals: “This makes study Harvard scientists exemplify.

The project has been a great teamwork. First, scientists from the Faculty of Medicine of Baylor (Texas) used specialized microscopes to register the brain activity of that cubic millimeter of visual cortex of a mouse while the animal watched different films and videos of YouTube. Then, the investigators of the Allen Institute took that same portion of brain and divided it into more than 24,000 layers, each of them more than a thousand times finer than a hair, and they resorted to electronic microscopes to take images in high resolution of each cut. Finally, another group from Princeton University used artificial intelligence to rebuild each cell and all connections in a virtual image until that wiring diagram and the functional map of the largest brain so far.

More than 150 neuroscientists have worked on this project. The work has been titanic. “Cutting the more than 20,000 sections necessary for the data set took 12 days and nights in a row, with our team working in shifts to ensure that no consecutive section was lost,” Exemplifies Da Costa. An enormous amount of information was collected, 1.6 Petabytes of data, which is equivalent to watching an HD video continuously for 22 years. But the work has already begun to bear fruit.

“A giant step”

The first studies have revealed new types of cells and innovative organizational and functional principles, explains the Allen Institute. It highlights, for example, the finding of a new principle of inhibition within the brain. Thus, although it was thought that inhibitory cells (those that suppress neuronal activity) only damping the action of other cells, the microns project researchers have discovered that the level of communication is, in fact, much more sophisticated: the inhibitory cells do not act randomly, but are very selective in terms of excitative cells to which they are directed and cooperated Deleting many excitatory cells, others are more precise and are aimed at a single type …).

And these discoveries are only the beginning. The expectations with all the knowledge that this great research keeps are very high. To advance the understanding of thought and consciousness, but also to take steps in the study and approach of numerous diseases, says Da Costa: “brain diseases are, ultimately, the result of changes in the brain structure, so understanding said structure is fundamental in the long term. In the medium and long term, the detailed mapping of inhibitory cell connections, combined with the genetic descriptions of these same cellular types, could be crucial if crucial It is discovered that one of these cells is involved in a particular disease.

For Rafael Yuste, Professor of Biological Sciences and director of the Neurotecnology Center at Columbia University (New York) and promoter of the Brain initiative, this research, in which he has not participated, is “a tour de force With a lot of richness of results, such as putting one of many bricks in a huge building to understand the brain. Another remittance of impressive articlesmapping the cell types of the brain, which are the neurons that generate all these connections. This is another of the most impressive results that has emerged from the United States Brain project [la actual investigación también está apoyada por la Iniciativa BRAIN]. Now, the great challenge is to put these two new science trunks; In other words, understand what connections arise from what type of neurons, ”says the scientist in statements to the Science Media Center (SMC) Spain portal.

For his part, Juan Lerma, a research professor at the CSIC-RUMH Neuroscience Institute, considers that this work “feels most of the bases of a number of rules of purposeful group that, though assumed, weren’t demonstrated and represented lagoons of the data of the nervous system.” “These findings are an enormous step, lengthy anticipated and that’s nothing however the tip of the iceberg of what’s to return within the compression of the functioning of the mind,” additionally impacts SMC.