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World's Most Detailed Brain Map Built From a Grain of Brain Tissue
Using cutting-edge microscopy, AI, and 3D reconstruction, researchers captured more than 200,000 cells and over 500 million connections.
The work revealed surprising principles of brain organization, including new inhibitory cell behaviors and network-wide coordination. This achievement provides a foundational tool for understanding brain function, intelligence, and neurological disorders.
Key Facts:
Scale of Detail: The brain map includes 200,000+ cells, 4 km of axons, and 523 million synapses.
Surprising Discovery: Inhibitory neurons selectively coordinate activity rather than just dampen it.
Scientific Impact: Offers new insights into brain diseases and models of intelligence.
Source: Allen Institute
From a tiny sample of tissue no larger than a grain of sand, scientists have come within reach of a goal once thought unattainable: building a complete functional wiring diagram of a portion of the brain.
In 1979, famed molecular biologist, Francis Crick, stated that it would be "[impossible] to create an exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing."
But during the last seven years, a global team of more than 150 neuroscientists and researchers has brought that closer to reality.
The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) Project has built the most detailed wiring diagram of a mammalian brain to date.
Today, scientists published the scientific findings from this massive data resource in a collection of ten studies in the Nature family of journals.
The wiring diagram and its data, freely available through the MICrONS Explorer, are 1.6 petabytes in size (equivalent to 22 years of non-stop HD video), and offer never-before-seen insight into brain function and organization of the visual system.
"The MICrONS advances published in this special issue of Nature are a watershed moment for neuroscience, comparable to the Human Genome Project in their transformative potential," said David A. Markowitz, Ph.D., former IARPA program manager who coordinated this work.