DANIEL BERGER, XIAOLONG JIANG, FABIAN SINZ, XAQ PITKOW, ANDREAS TOLIASThe morphology and electrophysiology of approximately 2,000 neurons in the visual cortices of adult mice have been catalogued, along with the connectivity between more than 11,000 possible pairs of these cells. The resulting census, published in the journal Science today (November 26), reveals a number of new interneuron cell types as well as hitherto unappreciated patterns of local connections.
“I’m incredibly enthusiastic about what these authors have done,” said neuroscientist Giorgio Ascoli of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Fairfax, Virginia, who was not involved in the work. “It’s a truly impressive tour de force in terms of optimization of every experimental and analytical detail.”
“The amount of work that went into this is really amazing,” agreed Arthur Toga, director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging in Los Angeles who also was not involved in the study. “They took a very detailed, typically small-sample approach and applied it to a big survey.”
The murine neocortex—the outermost part of the cerebral cortex—is involved in higher brain functions such as sensory perception, conscious thought, language and reasoning. To determine how such complex functions arise, researchers ...
