New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience | Quanta Magazine
What Zador showed me was a map of 50,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex of a mouse. It indicated where the cell bodies of every neuron sat and where they sent their long axon branches. A neural map of this size and detail has never been made before. Forgoing the traditional method of brain mapping that involves marking neurons with fluorescence, Zador had taken an unusual approach that drew on the long tradition of molecular biology research at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island. He used bits of genomic information to imbue a unique RNA sequence or “bar code” into each individual neuron. He then dissected the brain into cubes like a sheet cake and fed the pieces into a DNA sequencer. The result: a 3-D rendering of 50,000 neurons in the mouse cortex (with as many more to be added soon) mapped with single cell resolution. This work, Zador’s magnum opus, is still being refined for publication. But in a paper recently published by Nature, he and his colleagues showed that the technique, called MAPseq (Multiplexed Analysis of Projections by Sequencing), can be used to find new cell types and projection patterns never before observed. The paper also demonstrated that this new high-throughput mapping method is strongly competitive in accuracy with the fluorescent technique, which is the current gold standard but works best with small numbers of neurons.