By Richard Stone
Shanghai—The human brain is by no means terra incognita. We’ve known for decades that memories form in the hippocampus and our fight-or-flight response stirs in the amygdala. But scientists are nowhere near a thorough inventory of our 86 billion neurons and roughly equivalent number of glial cells, much less a map of how different cell types join up into circuits to enable thought.
A new global collaboration intends to chart that terrain in exquisite detail. On 20 September, scientists from around the world gathered at a conference here to launch the International Consortium for Primate Brain Mapping (ICPBM). “We want to know the neural architecture underlying all the brain’s functions,” says ICPBM chair Mu-ming Poo, scientific director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The new consortium aims to analyze marmoset, macaque, and human brains to create so-called multiomic atlases, which would include all cell types; their patterns of gene expression based on RNA transcripts, or transcriptomes; and each cell’s projections across the brain. Set to run for 25 years, the effort will produce multiomic maps not just for monkeys but for developing, adult, aging, and diseased human brains from diverse populations.
