The product of our neurons

摘要

Blology is in the midst of a revolution that is changing what we know and can know. The largescale studies of genes and proteins, known as genomics and proteomics, have been joined in neuroscience by connectomics, the endeavour to find the complete wiring diagram of the brain - the connectome. It is a feat so far achieved just once, for the roundworm C. elegans, which has 302 neurons to our 100 billion. What has made the "omic" sciences possible is the exponentially increasing amount of data that computers can collect and analyse. Once a certain threshold has been achieved, something that seemed impossible becomes possible, and soon becomes routine. This has already happened with genomics.