Last year a new coordinate system named Waxholm Space (WHS) for the mouse brain was published (see “WHS: The Standard Mouse Brain Coordinate System?“). The space was named after the Swedish city Waxholm where, in February of 2007, a group of scientists was assembled through the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) to discuss what they might do to help coordinate mouse brain research data. They decided on establishing a reference atlas of the mouse brain that would act as a universal coordinate system for mouse data. A new paper “Digital Atlasing and Standardization in the Mouse Brain” (published February 3, 2011 in PLoS Computational Biology) describes the goals of the INCF Digital Atlasing Infrastructure team to create a framework that not only enables interoperability between existing and future mouse data resources but also provides the tools for the discovery and publishing of data aggregated from distributed resources.
Figure 1. The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) Digital Atlasing Infrastructure enables interoperability between existing and future mouse brain data resources. Figure 3 from “Digital Atlasing and Standardization in the Mouse Brain” by Michael Hawrylycz, Richard A. Baldock, Albert Burger, Tsutomu Hashikawa, G. Allan Johnson, Maryann Martone, Lydia Ng, Chris Lau, Stephen D. Larsen, Jonathan Nissanov, Luis Puelles, Seth Ruffins, Fons Verbeek, Ilya Zaslavsky and Jyl Boline. PLoS Computational Biology Volume 7, Number 2, February 3, 2011.
To achieve their goals, providing a common mouse brain coordinate system was just one step. They also needed to provide a collection of distributed services that would support publication, discovery, and the aggregate use of different distributed atlas resources. The prototype version of the INCF Digital Atlasing Infrastructure is released and supports mapping between WHS reference space and the following online resources:
- Allen Brain Atlas reference atlas (ABA)
- Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project (EMAP)
- Whole Brain Catalog (WBC)
Kudos to the coordinating organization INCF and all of the people from organizations around the world that are working hard together to make a global atlas-based data sharing framework a reality! Their work will have a huge impact on the future of neuroscience, including the application of research data for medical purposes, and should be supported by everyone.
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