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Molecular neuroscience

BAC-to-BAC images of the brain

Nature volume 425, pages 907–908 (2003)Cite this article

A large-scale effort to uncover the gene-expression profiles of individual neurons and create a demographic atlas of the brain is under way. First data from this project are revealing new information about neuronal development.

For centuries, avenues to understanding the nervous system were confined to post-mortem anatomical studies and clinical portraits of the brain in disease states. The first approach has produced a fairly good map of the brain; the second, a catalogue of behaviours that we can trace with a reasonable amount of accuracy to distinct brain regions. The challenge of neurobiology has been to bridge the gap between map and catalogue — to understand how the brain's billions of neurons and their myriad connections mediate perception, behaviour, learning, memory and consciousness. In a large-scale effort spanning several institutions, Gong and colleagues1 have now taken a big step in this direction. They have used genetically engineered mice and the tools of gene-expression analysis to begin constructing what is akin to a demographic atlas of the brain, identifying patterns of gene expression in individual neurons, and revealing differences between cells that were hitherto thought to be identical. They present the first data from this project on page 917 of this issue.

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Figure 1: Visualizing gene expression.

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References

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  1. the Departments of Neuroscience, and Molecular and Human Genetics, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, 77030, Texas, USA

    Huda Y. Zoghbi

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  1. Huda Y. Zoghbi
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Zoghbi, H. BAC-to-BAC images of the brain. Nature 425, 907–908 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/425907a

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/425907a

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