Tag: Brain Science

The new word connectome was recently coined to indicate a complete description of the physical wiring of the brain.

The United States government, through the National Institutes of Health, has recently kicked off a five year Human Connectome Project that funds a number of laboratories and institutions with the ultimate goal of describing the physical wiring of the human brain.

There are many technical hurdles to get over before the end goal is reached but there are a number of exciting recent advances that should provide interesting and useful results in the near term while providing the foundation for achieving the ultimate goal at some point in the future.

Take a look at some of the images of brain tissue using BrainBow technology:
http://www.google.com/images?q=brainbow

Other related blog posts:

Brain Research Using Online Data Repositories: Network Structure of the Brain

It’s clear to me that the way we will communicate and learn about biology will be very different from the textbooks and journal articles of today. It’ll be done through online simulations and visualizations of biological systems linked with their raw data sources.

A number of XML vocabularies have been or are being developed that are important tools towards achieving this goal. One is the Biological Pathway Exchange (BioPAX) vocabulary.

The team largely responsible for creating BioPAX over a number of years just published a paper “The BioPAX community standard for pathway data sharing” in the September 9, 2010 online issue of Nature Biotechnology.

A new paper describes the creation and maintenance of functional brain cell (neuron) networks (average size 41 neurons) within a simulated network of 1000 neurons that could be a mechanism underlying working memory.

The focus is on the precise timing of signals in the brain and their importance in forming functional networks with properties observed in recordings from brain areas involved in working memory. One of the attractive properties of these networks is that a large number of them can form over overlapping sets of neurons providing a way to pack a lot of memories into a relatively small set of brain cells.

The paper, by Szatmary and Izhikevich, is titled “Spike-Timing Theory of Working Memory” was published in the August 2010 issue of PLOS Computational Biology.