Mapping the brain: of mice and men

Abstract

“When we set out to develop the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas some 8 years ago, there were those who said it couldn’t be done”, recalls Allan Jones, chief executive offi cer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle (WA, USA). Those doubters were proved emphatically wrong in 2006, when the Institute published the fi rst genomically and anatomically complete map of the mouse brain, allowing users of the free resource to pinpoint the expression of genes in the mouse brain at the level of individual cells. The atlas has already notched up more than 500 citations in peerreviewed studies. But for Jones, the mouse brain was just a warm-up. “Model systems are fantastic tools for modern science, but we ultimately want to understand the human brain in its normal and disease context, and a comprehensive human brain dataset certainly helps”, Jones told The Lancet Neurology, after the Institute launched its latest application: the Allen Human Brain Atlas. Like the mouse brain atlas, the human brain atlas is free to access, and was designed from the outset with researchers in mind. “It displays the gene-expression map for any gene in the human brain in an interactive platform so the user can spin, splice, or manipulate the image in just about any way...and then navigate directly to the detailed, raw data underlying the 3D summary views”, explains Jones. And if you still want more, there are a host of other tools to investigate the data online, along with all the original images, gene-expression data, and MRI data to download.