Scientists welcome billionaire's brain project

With a $100-million contribution, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen last week announced the foundation in Seattle of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The nonprofit institute, which has been in development for 2 years, will immediately be tackling an ambitious project, the Allen Brain Atlas, which seeks in 5 years or less to create a three-dimensional atlas of the mouse brain at the genetic level and to make it publicly available online. The hope is to help establish relationships between genes and behavior. "It's really badly needed. This is what's needed at this exact point in time," said Society for Neuroscience President Huda Akil of the University of Michigan. "My sense is they've assembled a great team to do it." "The goal is to be able to reference the expression pattern of every gene relative to other genes in the brain," said Joe Takahashi, a member of the institute's scientific advisory board and director of Northwestern University's Center for Functional Genomics. "It's very exciting because of the scale. No other project has this scale. This wouldn't happen anywhere else. The NIH isn't going to expend $100 million for this; it's too much money."To accomplish their task, Takahashi explained that project researchers will rapidly scan RNA expression of roughly 30,000 genes using a high-throughput method for in situ hybridization developed by Gregor Eichele at the Max Planck Institute, also an Allen Institute scientific advisory board member. "He's developed what I call a first-generation automation method," Takahashi said. In situ hybridization "is a very labor-intensive process," said Takahashi. "A lot of the processing steps here are done by robotics. The Allen Institute will probably take this to the next generation as far as scale is concerned."Takahashi added that the atlas "will definitely" have anatomical resolution on the level of the groups of specialized nerve cells known as nuclei. The first major release of data is expected for early 2004, with quarterly updates thereafter.Institute for Systems Biology President Leroy Hood said that for gene expression mapping of the brain to ultimately be successful, research will have to go past the nuclei level to single cell analysis. "Can it be done? With a lot of smart people doing it, I think there are ways to do it. Will it be easy? I think it'll be really challenging," he said. "If they can come anywhere near being able to define specific cell types, I think it will be incredibly useful to neurobiology and cell biology in general." "I think the idea is an interesting one," Hood added. "The key is going to be recruitment of really outstanding people. The task is an enormously challenging and daunting one. With a $100-million down payment, I think they're in a position to recruit pretty good people."In addition to luring talent and taking advantage of Eichele's gene-scanning system, Akil remarked that the Allen project is well prepared for the "constant challenge" represented by informatics. The project could generate more petabytes of data than exist today on the entire World Wide Web. "This is precisely what they tackle up front. That's really the beauty of this plan," Akil said. "Otherwise, the information is not property annotated or retrieved. I'm very, very happy with the fact that they are paying such attention to organization and access to information." "There's a whole bunch of new algorithms that will have to be utilized to map expression patterns onto a standard brain," Takahashi explained. Arthur Toga, a fellow Allen Institute scientific advisory board member, will contribute his expertise. Toga is director of the University of California, Los Angeles, neuroimaging laboratory and codirector of the International Consortium of Brain Mapping.He emphasized the potential of the Allen atlas to look at gene expression patterns over time, "whether in development, or something simple like a diurnal cycle, or disorders." The work done "at a coarser level on humans in structures and function has taught us a great deal about doing it at this cellular level," Toga said.Akil noted that there are many different brain atlases in existence, from a multitude of species and with differing emphases on anatomy, topography, electrophysiology, or cell structure and morphology. "The Society for Neuroscience has initiated a project to survey all the current and planned databases relating to the brain and what they cover and don't cover and discuss how they can be interlinked," she said. "The piece taken here by the Allen Institute is absolutely keystone, which interfaces the Human Genome Project with neuroscience," Akil added. "A huge amount of the human genome is expressed in the brain, with different genes expressed in different cells at different times. Where they are expressed tells us a huge amount of their potential functions. This is an all-important starting point."The institute will seek additional government and private funding. "There will be partnerships, although the specific structure of those is still up in the air," Toga said.

Scientists welcome billionaire's brain project

Gene expression map is 'badly needed' and will benefit from technology advantages

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of