a neuroscientist’s dream is to get to know the human brain with the same precision as the nervous system of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, whose 100 neurons exact synaptic connections all years are an open book for science. And today are closer than ever to that ideal with BigBrain, a digital reconstruction of the human brain full 3D and ultra-high resolution that far outstrips any previous initiative of this kind. BigBrain is the essential tool they need neurological laboratories worldwide to elucidate the form and function of our brains. And will be publicly available at zero cost.
Until now there are otherbrain atlas, but only arrive at the macroscopic level, or visible. Its resolution only reaches the level of a cubic millimeter, and the volume of brain neurons easily fit 1,000. The new low BigBrain focus to a level “almost cell”, according to scientists who have created it. That means you get to discriminate each small circuit of neurons that is behind our mental activity, which may include all available information on the brain, from genes and neurotransmitter receptors to cognition and behavior.
a patient
reference brain is based on a woman who died at age 65, which was filleted at 7,400 histological sections of just 20 microns (the thickness of a hair, and about the size of a cell). The BigBrain, according to its creators, opens the way for understanding the neurobiological basis of cognition, language and emotion, and also to investigate neurological diseases and develop drugs against them. The model is presented in Science and will be available for registered users http://bigbrain.cbrain.mcgill.ca.
The work has been coordinated by Katrin Amunts, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Jülich, Germany, and Alan Evans Neurological Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Both explained their research in a conference call for reporters with the editor of Science, Peter Stern.
Perhaps the most widely used human cell line by laboratories around the world over the past half century is the line HeLa, the crop comes from a uterine tumor that was removed in 1951 to a patient named Henrietta Lacks (of hence the name of the line) that, despite having died a few months after the operation, and got a unique form of immortality.
The voluntary lacked neurological or psychiatric history
reporters yesterday showed a special interest in women of 65 who has been immortalized his brain as a digital model that endures for centuries or millennia. Who knows if the neuroscience of the future will be able to rebuild from BigBrain thoughts and deepest desires of this woman, the recesses of their emotions and the ambiguities of morality. That is undressing for posterity an autobiography you laugh.
media’s insistence, however, ran into the uncompromising commitment of scientists to preserve the privacy of the deceased woman. Neither Amunts or Evans and his colleague Karl Zilles, or indeed the Science editor who organized the hearing, declined to give news about life that somehow, recorded for posterity. Amunts saying only that “lacked a neurological or psychiatric history” and in that sense “is what we would call a normal brain.” This, at least, us from the Frankenstein myth for once.
“The authors have expanded the boundaries of current technology,” said Stern, who sees the research, in a way, as the natural consequence of the work of classical neuroanatomists with Cajal to the head, which laid a century ago the basis of the structural description of the human brain. Most people, including medical students, tend to see the anatomy as an annoying but unavoidable tostón to pass the course.
But if biology has taught us a lesson is to explain how the function, to understand the functioning of a biological system always starts to see its structure. Remember genetics: the sheer, simple and naked form of the DNA double helix, where the letters in a row are complemented by those of the other, self-explanatory that living things can make copies of themselves. Also the shape of proteins, with their propellers and blades and folding capricious, often explaining what each one of them from burning the sugar we eat to activate neurons that make us think.
Stern, like many other scientists, is convinced that unspoken law of biology has jurisdiction also on the brain, on the mechanisms of our mental life. We shapes. “This work can be seen as a culmination of anatomy,” said the editor of Science. “Without a thorough knowledge of the structure of the brain will never understand the rest of neurobiology”.
Evans also proclaimed: “Big science has reached the brain.” The slogan is a veiled reference to the genome projects and particle accelerators, which involve six figures, medium-term programming and a scientific teams whose signatures rarely fit on the page of the journal which publishes. Although there are hundreds of laboratories worldwide research in neurobiology, the brain had so far with great planning of this type, such as those used to sequence the human genome and find the Higgs boson. Big science has reached the brain.
The result will be publicly available for other researchers
depth of the issues involved, the great achievements of the work have been of a technical nature. “The project has been a tour de force to join the more than 7,400 images of individual histological sections,” says Evans, “each with its own distortions, rips and tears, into a coherent, three-dimensional volume. BigBrain allows for the first time 3D exploration citoarquitectónica human anatomy. ” The prefix cyto means cell, and in the mouth of Evans wants to emphasize the high resolution of the model, close to the cellular level: Sleep near the worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
Scientists took the dead woman’s brain at 65 and encastraron in paraffin wax, a preliminary step before dissection usual fine. And this was fine: the slices had only 20 micron (thousandths of a millimeter) thick. Not even a German scientist has a pulse so strong enough to do that, and the researchers used a special machine for this purpose, a microtome gigantic.
thin sliceswoman’s brain were mounted on slides and treated with substances that stain most important cellular structures, much to the Cajal or Golgi, if you look good. What ever could have dreamed such great neurologists of the past is the prodigious computing power, and sophistication of the mathematics associated with access to current science. However, data collection took about 1000 hours, and the robots still can not do everything.
BigBrain, the high resolution 3D map and “almost” cell that is already part of the public domain, is a big step toward deeper understanding of the brain and mind. Your objective is to understand the neurobiological basis of learning and knowledge acquisition, language and emotions, clumsiness and of human creativity. It is public and free, and so far no use to spy on anyone.
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