The mouse is the most commonly used vertebrate experimental model in neuroscience research, and the new atlas paves the way for a greater understanding of the human brain. The atlas describes the type, location, and molecular information of more than 32 million cells and provides information on connectivity between these cells.
“A cell’s DNA is like its language,” said Professor Bing Ren, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.
“Just like there are certain root words that many languages share, there are certain genes and gene expression patterns that are conserved across different species.”
“Learning to understand and interpret the brain’s molecular language can help us learn more about how the brain works in general and about what happens to the brain in neuropsychiatric conditions.”
“The mouse atlas has brought the intricate network of mammalian brain cells into unprecedented focus, giving researchers the details needed to understand human brain function and diseases,” said Dr. Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The new atlas describes the types of cells in each region of the mouse brain and their organization within those regions.
In addition to this structural information, the cell atlas provides an incredibly detailed catalog of the cell’s transcriptome — the complete set of gene readouts in a cell, which contains instructions for making proteins and other cellular products.
The transcriptomic information included in the atlas is hierarchically organized, detailing cell classes, subclasses, and thousands of individual cell clusters within the brain.
The atlas also characterizes the cell epigenome — chemical modifications to a cell’s DNA and chromosomes that alter the way the cell’s genetic information is expressed — detailing thousands of epigenomic cell types and millions of candidate genetic regulation elements for different…
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