There is growing agreement that we need to comprehensively map out
circuits in vertebrate brains - brainwide approaches to connectivity
hold similar promise for neuroscience as genome-wide
approaches have had for cellular biology. Different efforts are now
under way, employing a multiplicity of techniques, at different scales
of analysis. We have chosen to emphasize the whole-brain scale of
analysis. The power of this approach has been illustrated by the
brain-wide Gene Expression Atlas of the mouse brain from the Allen Institute.
The first half of the talk will focus on the analysis of this unique whole brain
data set.

In the Mouse Brain Architecture project, we aim to systematically map
circuitry at a brain-wide scale by placing injections of classical and
viral tracer substances throughout the mouse brain, and acquiring
full-brain digital data sets using automated slide scanning light microscopy.
The approach is contingent on the existence of a "mesoscopic" level of
organization in the brain (nuclei and brain regions in classical neuroanatomical
atlases), and a corresponding brain wide meso-circuit, consisting of
the collection of neuronal projection patterns between these regions.
This is a sparse labeling method, requiring the registration of many (thousands) of
digitized brains to a common reference space, ultimately giving rise
to a large (petabyte level) data set. This will provide primary
empirical data to neuroscientists about neural connectivity, and also
provide significant challenges and opportunities to the computational
community.

Video registration (1h26min)

Podcast interview (41min)