A year to the day after President Barack Obama announced a $100 million "BRAIN Initiative" to accelerate discoveries in how gray matter thinks, feels, remembers and sometimes succumbs to devastating diseases, scientists on Wednesday said they had achieved a key milestone toward that goal.
Writing in the journal Nature, they unveiled the mouse "connectome," a map showing the sinuous connections that neurons make throughout the mouse brain as they form functional circuits.
The mouse connectome "provides the most detailed analysis of brain circuitry currently available for any mammalian brain," said neuroscientist David Van Essen of Washington University in St. Louis, co-leader of the human connectome project, which aims to do that for Homo sapiens. "It is truly a landmark study."