Amazingly Detailed Map Reveals How the Brain Changes With Aging:
Last week, in a technological tour-de-force, a European team from the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden, led by Dr. Seth G.N. Grant at the University of Edinburgh, redefined impossibility with a paper in Science. Peering into the brains of mice at different ages—one day, one week, and all the way up to an elderly 18 months—the team constructed maps of roughly 5 billion synapses, outlining a timeline of their diversity and numbers in over 100 different brain regions with age.
[...] In their new study, the team built a time map of synapses in the mouse brain, which they call the “lifespan synaptome architecture,” or LSA. The project is part of the Mouse Lifespan Synaptome Atlas, which comes with an assortment of tools for researchers to dig into to better understand how our brains age with time.
To build their synaptic timeline, the team analyzed the brain of a type of transgenic mice that have some proteins in their synapses highlighted with a fluorescent protein. The team picked ten points in their lifespan, covering the entire range of newly born to adolescent to adulthood and the elderly.
Journal Reference:
Mélissa Cizeron, Zhen Qiu, Babis Koniaris, et al. A brain-wide atlas of synapses across the mouse lifespan [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba3163)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:05PM (5 children)
Note to authors, for your next paper, let some of the mice run free in a large, interesting area...then compare with similar mice that live in typical lab cages. My bet is that the results are very different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @03:24PM (2 children)
Yeap. The ones in the cages are still there, the ones let run free transited the guts of my cat a long time ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:06PM (1 child)
Keep your damn cat out of my experiment!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2020, @07:15PM
It is believed brains are quantum mechanical in nature, you need a Schrodingers cat just to clean up corrupted data. . . .
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 17 2020, @04:16PM (1 child)
They're Pinky and The Brain
Yes, Pinky and The Brain
One is a genius
The other's insane.
They're laboratory mice
Their genes have been spliced
They're dinky
They're Pinky and The Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain
Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain
Brain.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday June 18 2020, @02:13AM
"I think so, Brain. But, me and Pippy Longstocking. I mean, what would the kids look like?"