![]() ![]() It was chosen because some of the human brain tissue the Allen Institute uses comes, with permission, from surgeries performed on epilepsy patients. In the new paper, the researchers investigated human brain cells from the middle temporal gyrus (MTG), an area associated with memory and the integration of information. “The database they have generated is not just an incredibly useful research tool but also a harbinger of the sort of data sets we will soon be able to develop and use to probe brain disorders.”īecause of the difficulty of studying living human brain tissue, most of what we know about human brains so far comes from either postmortem brain tissue or from brain– scanning techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. Koch and his colleagues’ study amounts to a look at the cutting edge of genomics and neuroscience, says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist and geneticist at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the work. You need to know, of the 100 different cell types expressed in the amygdala, which one, specifically, is overexpressed or underexpressed, which synapse is not functional anymore.” It’s not good enough to know there’s something wrong in the amygdala. “We believe that many of the psychological and neurological diseases are diseases of specific cell types. “What this is going to lead to is human cellular neuroscience,” says Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute and a co-author of the paper. Those differences are likely to influence brain circuitry and may explain why the great majority of clinical trials for therapeutic drugs that were conducted in mice have not succeeded when moved into human patients, making it clear how essential it is to study human brains directly. ![]() In addition, when the scientists compared cell types from humans and mice, they found that the majority of human brain cells have counterparts in mouse brains but that there are also remarkable differences. But by using gene expression-the RNA transcribed from DNA to make proteins-as a way of categorizing cells, the study’s authors defined 75 distinct cell types in that brain region, and they now think there may be on the order of a few thousand cell types across the whole brain, far more than previously believed. It revealed what the Allen Institute calls “the most detailed ‘parts list’ of the human brain to date.” As a reminder of how much we still do not know, that list focused on just one part of the human brain. They know that every time neuroscientists increase the resolution with which they peer into the brain, they discover new, unimaginable levels of complexity.Ī new study by researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and their colleagues, published on August 21 in Nature, did just that. Such a statement does not diminish the considerable progress neuroscience has made in the more than a century since Italian physician Camillo Golgi and Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal created the first drawings of neurons. About five years ago, preeminent neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University was asked by a radio interviewer what mysteries remained about the brain. ![]()
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