Researchers say they’ve accomplished a feat that was said to be impossible 46 years ago: mapping the cells in a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and tracing their activity.
The achievement, documented today in a set of research papers published by the Nature family of journals, is being compared to the Apollo moon shots that were launched more than 50 years ago, and to the drafts of the human genome that were released more than 20 years ago.
Scientists from Seattle’s Allen Institute played a key role in the $100 million effort known as the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program, or MICrONS. More than 150 researchers worked together through MICrONS to create a detailed 3D map of a cubic millimeter taken from a mouse’s brain — and figure out how the 200,000 brain cells in a speck the size of a coarse grain of sand work together.