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Spectrum: Autism Research News

Mapping the human brain

by  /  14 March 2008
THIS ARTICLE IS MORE THAN FIVE YEARS OLD

This article is more than five years old. Autism research — and science in general — is constantly evolving, so older articles may contain information or theories that have been reevaluated since their original publication date.

The human brain is inarguably the most complex system that has ever faced the er, human brain.

Most neuroscientists freely admit that we know next to nothing about how the brain works or what causes it to go awry.

Scientists funded by the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science are setting out on an ambitious four-year plan to map genetic activity in the human brain, essentially creating a three-dimensional functional map of the brain.

Five years ago, billionaire Paul Allen of Microsoft fame created the Allen Institute, whose main project aimed to map the mouse brain. Scientists sliced out thin sections of mouse brains and examined the genes active in that section.

The resulting $41 million 180-terabyte ‘atlasʼ of the mouse brain debuted in Nature in December 2006. The human project, which will use up to 10 brains of recently deceased healthy people, is expected to take four years and $55 million.

For all the mouse genetics we rely on to study human diseases, though, the human brain is 2,000 times larger than the mouse brain (and maybe at least that many times as complex). So this new project is setting its sights a tad lower.

For the first two years, researchers will divide the human brain into somewhere between 500 and 2,000 anatomical regions and scan gene expression in those regions. Based on those results, theyʼll select the 500 most interesting genes and examine their expression across the whole brain.

You could imagine, for example, that the brains of children with autism express different genes in the amygdala, a brain region that has been implicated in the disease, than the brains of typically developing children. Or not.

The institute is also launching two other projects: a two-year $15 million project to track the activity of around 4,000 mouse genes during development ― which could tremendously help autism research; and a yearlong $2 million project to create a genetic map of the mouse spinal cord, to aid research on multiple sclerosis, ALS and spinal cord injuries.

There is also has a separate project to characterize gene expression specifically in the human cortex.


TAGS:   autism