For the first time, scientists map the half-billion connections that allow mice to see
"Writing in Scientific American in 1979, the leading biologist of his era, Francis Crick, suggested that technological innovators in neuroscience should focus on achieving attainable goals. "It is no use asking for the impossible, such as, say, the exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing."
[...] "After nine years of painstaking work, an international team of researchers at Princeton have this week published a precise map of the vision centers of a mouse brain, revealing the exquisite structures and functional systems of mammalian perception.
To date, it is the largest and most detailed such rendering of neural circuits in a mammalian brain."
"In making the map, the researchers digitally disentangled tens of thousands of individual tree-like neurons, traced each neuron's distinct system of branches, and then reconstructed them one by one into a vast network of circuitry—what scientists call a "connectome."
"Princeton University's H. Sebastian Seung, the Evnin Professor in Neuroscience compared the broader impacts of a future project mapping the human connectome to the Human Genome Project's transformation of genomics.
"Of course, there are key differences between the genome and the connectome. Namely, whereas the genome can be written on a single line using sequences of a four-letter alphabet, the brain is a morass of tangled fibers that process information in real time on an extremely small energy budget. But the potential for transformation of brain science could prove to be even more breathtaking than that of genomics."
More information: The MICrONS Consortium, Functional connectomics spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08790-w
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 13, @04:50AM
Now that they have done one mouse optic system, they need to start doing many more...and then "diff-ing" them. Dollars to donuts, there are big differences between individuals, which may eventually help figure out how it all works.
(Score: 2) by aliks on Sunday April 13, @01:41PM (1 child)
Hi Janrinok,
Thanks for reformatting my submission!
I'd love to get it right first time, but having looked around the site there is not much help on how to format a new submission. I thought it was easier than this, did I miss something or some tutorial page??
To err is human, to comment divine
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday April 13, @06:17PM
Aliks, we are very happy with your submissions, don't worry about it. (In fact another editor has already commented on them in our own discussions.!)
Part of the editors' role is to try to keep a common look to the stories that we publish. Some do not fit into our standard layout, but where they can be made to fit then we try to do so. It means that the community know almost instinctively where to look for the important story link, or where to find links to scientific journals or papers.
But the the most important thing from an editor's point of view is to have some material that we can start working on. Your submissions meet that requirement just fine. Thank you for making the effort.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.