Neuron encyclopaedia fires up to reveal brain secrets

摘要

An ambitious plan is afoot to build the world's largest public catalogue of neuronal structures. The BigNeuron project, announced on 31 March by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, is designed to help researchers to simulate and understand the human brain. The project might also push neuroscientists to wrestle with fundamental - sometimes even emotional - questions about how to classify neurons. It is the era of the mega-scale brain initiative: Europe's Human Brain Project aims to model the human brain in a supercomputer, and the US BRAIN Initiative hopes to unravel how networks of neurons work together to produce thoughts and actions. Standing in the way of these projects is a surprising limitation. "We still don't know how many classes of neurons are in the brain," says neuroscientist Rafael Yuste at Columbia University in New York City.