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So I expected this to be about the human brain since sites like http://mousebrain.org/ http://mousebrain.org/ already existed, but it looks like it's research t

So I expected this to be about the human brain since sites like http://mousebrain.org/ http://mousebrain.org/ already existed, but it looks like it's research that has been done on mice brains as well? Can someone explain the differences here?

stenl 5y ago
Hey vanderZwan, we have a paper in the collection (there’s 17 brain atlas papers in this issue of Nature) on human, marmoset and mouse motor cortex (my group did the human). I think it’s cool that pretty much all the cell types could be aligned between those species, which diverged 90 million years ago. Our full human brain cell type atlas is work in progress but hopefully we’ll post the preprint early next year. (Edit) Direct link to the papers, which are all open access: https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/598/issues/7879 https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/598/issues/7879
pamplemoose 5y ago
the headline is attention seeking since there are numerous pre-existing brain atlases that describe the anatomy/cellular/molecular parts in different ways. You can check https://portal.brain-map.org/ https://portal.brain-map.org/ for many examples. I think a good comparison to this kind of work is what has happened previously in astronomy, where scientists work to answer their specific questions using large open datasets acquired using shared infrastructure (fancy telescopes for astronomy, microscopes for biology). Here is some more ongoing work from the Allen institute where you can make a scientific proposal for their openscope (https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/research/products-tools/openscope/ https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/research...)