Scientists map miles of wiring in mouse brain

What happened

Scientists Wednesday unveiled a functional 3-D map of the 84,000 neurons in a cubic millimeter of a mouse's brain, along with more than three miles of microscopic wiring — axons and smaller dendrites — and 523 million synapses connecting them.

The massive dataset, published in the journal Nature, and color-coded rendering of how each neuron communicates, mark a big "step toward unraveling the mystery of how our brains work," The Associated Press said.

Who said what

The mouse brain map — created by a team of 150 researchers with the federally funded MICrONS project, primarily at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Princeton and Baylor College of Medicine — seeks to discover how neurons interact to make us "think, feel, see, talk and move," the AP said. One hope is to "eventually find treatments for brain diseases" like Alzheimer's.

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The project discovered "patterns in the wiring of the brain that had escaped notice until now," The New York Times said. Brains are extremely complex, and "finding wiring rules is a win," said Harvard biophysicist Mariela Petkova. "The brain is a lot less messy than people thought."

What next?

The MICrONS project's next goal is mapping an entire mouse brain, a task that "would take decades" with "current methods," the Times said. But given the "milestone" advances made in charting the poppyseed-sized granule, "it's totally doable," said University of Vermont neuroscientist Davi Bock, who was not involved in the study, "and I think it's worth doing."