Brain Atlas Paves the Way for New Understanding of How the Brain Functions

Posted on Oct. 24, 2023, by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D

When NIH launched The BRAIN Initiative a decade ago, one of many ambitious goals was to develop innovative technologies for profiling single cells to create an open-access reference atlas cataloguing the human brains many parts. The ultimate goal wasnt to produce a single, static reference map, but rather to capture a dynamic view of how the brains many cells of varied types are wired to work together in the healthy brain and how this picture may shift in those with neurological and mental health disorders.

So Im now thrilled to report the publication of an impressive collection of work from hundreds of scientists in the BRAIN Initiatives Cell Census Network (BICCN), detailed in more than 20 papers in Science, Science Advances, and Science Translational Medicine. Among many revelations, this unprecedented, international effort has characterized more than 3,000 human brain cell types. To put this into some perspective, consider that the human lung contains 61 cell types. The work has also begun to uncover normal variation in the brains of individual people, some of the features that distinguish various disease states, and distinctions among key parts of the human brain and those of our closely related primate cousins.