SOU Creative Mapping

The Benefits of Brain Mapping

  “Many scientists now believe that real progress on learning how the brain works can be made only through highly funded, inter­disciplinary big science of the kind promised by US President Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro­technologies) and the European Commission’s Human Brain Project, both launched this year. The first steps will be to develop technologies to map the brain in unprecedented detail, in terms of activity and anatomy — and to develop theoretical neuroscience to make sense of it.

The approach is intimidating. Each of the big programmes is expected to absorb US$1 billion or more in the next decade (although not all of the money is yet in the bank). Some neuro­scientists worry that pumping so much money into top-down programmes will reduce support for small, hypothesis-driven projects in individual labs. They are also concerned that the money could be wasted by pouring it into schemes that turn out to be unhelpful.”

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Fly Over the ‘Brainbow’

Four years ago, Harvard scientists devised a way to make mouse neurons glow in a breathtaking array of colors, a technique dubbed “Brainbow.” This allowed scientists to trace neurons’ long arms, known as the dendrites and axons, through the brain with incredible ease, revealing a map of neuron connections.  Using a clever trick of genetic engineering, in which genes for three or more different fluorescent proteins were combined like paints to generate different hues, researchers created a system to make each neuron glow one of 100 different colors. The result was that the dendrites and axons of individual neurons, previously almost impossible to pick apart from their neighbors, could be traced through the mouse brain according to their color.  Now, fruit fly researchers have a similar bonanza on their hands. Last week, two Brainbow-based methods for making fly neurons glow customized colors—called dBrainbow and Flybow—were published in Nature Methods. This is the first time that scientists have converted the technique to work in fruit flies, and because these organisms have a very sophisticated set of existing genetic tools, researchers can exert even greater control over when and where the fluorescent proteins are expressed.  Because axons and dendrites are so long and fine, it’s hard to tell which neurons they are from. Researchers have traditionally had to stain just one or two neurons in each sample, painstakingly compiling data from many brains to build a map. In contrast, many neurons are easily discernible in this cross-section of a fly’s brain made using dBrainbow. Using dBrainbow images, Julie H. Simpson and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm could tell which motor neurons controlled parts of a fly’s proboscis, which it uses to take in food.

Brainbow is a term used to describe the process by which individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from neighboring neurons using fluorescent proteins. By randomly expressing different ratios of red, green, and blue derivatives of green fluorescent protein in individual neurons, it is possible to flag each neuron with a distinctive color. This process has been a major contribution to the field of connectomics, or the study of neural connections in the brain.