"עולם של גלקסיות" המורכב מקשרים כמעט אינסופיים – זה מה שמדענים גילו בתוך פיסה קטנטנה של חומר ממוחו של עכבר בוגר.
החוקרים אומרים שהם הצליחו ליצור את המיפוי התפקודי המפורט ביותר של מוח בעל חיים שנוצר עד כה.
"אנחנו מסתכלים רק על חלק זעיר אחד מתוך 500, ממוח של עכבר, והיופי והמורכבות שאנחנו יכולים לראות בנוירונים האלה ובמאות מיליוני החיבורים ביניהם...", אומר אחד החוקרים.
המדענים מקווים שפענוח מפות המוח והמעגלים העצביים של המוח יסייעו לשפוך אור על מחלות כמו אלצהיימר, אוטיזם והפרעות נוירולוגיות. ____________________
A world of galaxies made up of near-infinite connections, that's what scientists have
discovered inside a piece of brain matter the size of a poppy seed. Researchers from the Allen
Institute for Brain Science say they've plotted the most detailed functional map of an animal
brain to date. Here's what they found. An exquisite forest inside a speck. That's how electron
microscopy expert Clay Reid, PhD, describes the most detailed brain map ever made. You're looking
at a tiny section of the brain of an adult mouse. This diagram reveals the wiring that connects
84,000 neurons, or brain cells, as they fire off messages. The brain is kind of structurally
like a giant ball of spaghetti, right? You have all of these wires, they're all completely
intertangled. It's a complete mess, except for at the ends of those pieces of spaghetti, that's
where they actually talk to each other. Forrest Coleman is one of the project's
researchers. He explains how brain cells use branch-like fibers to send signals through
connection points between the cells, called synapses. This small sample reveals 500 million
of them. In order to be able to figure out what are all the parts of the brain and who's talking
to who, we have to try to follow that spaghetti all the way through the mess and get to the end
and see who's on the other side of the line, so to speak. Alongside the Allen Institute,
researchers from Princeton University and Baylor College of Medicine were also involved in the
project. It definitely inspires a sense of awe, just like looking at pictures of the galaxies
and things. You get a sense of how small you are relative to the universe. You look at these kinds
of pictures of the brain and you get a sense of how complicated you are. We're looking at,
you know, one tiny part, one five hundredth of a mouse's brain, and the beauty and complexity
that you can see in these actual neurons and the hundreds of millions of connections between them.
Unraveling the map and the circuits of the brain could one day shed light on Alzheimer's disease,
autism or other disorders. NTD News.
