Human brain too big to map so they’re starting with mice

The human brain is a tangled highway of wires emanating from nearly 100 billion neurons, all of which communicate across trillions of junctions called synapses. Comparing brain volume from worm to humanEach 1,000 cubic microns of brain volume is schematically represented by a 1 cm. “If we get to a point where doing a whole mouse brain becomes routine, you could think about doing it in say, animal models of autism. Now, there is a way.”The National Institutes of Health awarded new recipients of the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® Initiative, or BRAIN Initiative, funding in early September. The Harvard team is being funded through the BRAIN Initiative Connectivity Across Scales network, aimed at developing research capacity and technical capabilities for creating wiring diagrams of whole brains.