p*****c
发帖数: 20445 | 12 Science评价还是不错的，专门写了News：
Science 5 November 2010:
Vol. 330. no. 6005, p. 747
DOI: 10.1126/science.330.6005.747
News of the Week
Neuroscience:
China's Brain Mappers Zoom In on Neural Connections
Kristen Minogue
Anyone in business, and even just fans of The Apprentice, knows that
connections matter. Neuroscientists understand that, too, which is why a
research team in China has gone to great lengths to create the most detailed
three-dimensional map yet of all the connections between the neurons in a
complete mouse brain. The project, unveiled this week online in Science (www
.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1191776), hasn't revealed any
major surprises so far, but its data and the new automated instrument that
produced the brain atlas provide an important foundation for future studies,
researchers say.
Mapping all the connections between neurons is crucial to understanding how
the brain functions, or malfunctions, explains neuroscientist Mihail Bota of
the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Trying to figure out
the brain without looking at its wiring, he says, is like trying to fix a
car with all the right components but no idea how they're connected: "You
don't know the input, you don't know the output, you don't know how the
signal is processed."
The new brain atlas project resembles several recent efforts, though the
previous ones have not captured the same kind of detail as the China effort.
Last year, a team of California researchers began slicing up the brain of
psychology's most famous amnesiac, Henry Gustav Molaison, to figure out what
exactly messed up his long-term memory (Science, 26 June 2009, p. 1634).
And in 2006, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington,
spent $41 million on its own 3D mouse brain map, which documents gene
expression at a cellular resolution in an online database available to
neuroscientists.
But neither of those projects imaged a whole brain at a resolution showing
the axons and dendrites connecting all the nerve cells. To accomplish this
challenging task, the researchers, led by Li Anan of the Britton Chance
Center for Biomedical Photonics in Wuhan, China, used a traditional slice-
and-scan technique but in a newly automated fashion. After removing the
centimeter-size brain from a mouse, they soaked the organ for 6 months in a
cellular stain, then dried and baked it. Next, they placed the brain on a
chopping block in the micro-optical sectioning tomography machine, a new
instrument the team developed that incorporates a diamond knife that can
slice tissue into wafer-thin strips micrometers thick. A light microscope
and image recorder immediately captures a picture of each brain strip before
the next one is cut. The instrument worked 10 days nonstop to collect the
data—eight terabytes in all—for the mouse brain atlas.
Documenting normal neuronal connections may be important because many of the
brain's more complicated maladies, such as autism or schizophrenia, may be
rooted in circuit problems, according to neuroscientist Jason Bohland of
Boston University. There's a growing feeling among neuro scientists, he says
, that social or linguistic disorders could be caused by disruptions in the
pathways between nerve cells—and in order to figure out what's going on at
that level, scientists need more detailed maps. "You don't have complex
behavior emerging at the level of brain regions. You have it emerging at the
level of circuits, " he says.
The new images offer a broad, comprehensive outlook on the brain, one more
focused on the brain's architecture than its biology, says Kelly Overly, a
neuroscientist at the Allen Institute. Still, it could be a valuable
comparison tool for more specific, targeted studies. "There's so many things
you could do with this sort of data, " says Bohland.
【在 n*****d 的大作中提到】
: 这个发science有点勉强。更好的技术早有了。庄晓薇他们的结果应该快出来了吧。
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