NIH’s BRAIN Initiative puts $500 million into creating most detailed ever human brain atlas

The BRAIN Initiative wants to create the world's most comprehensive map of cells in the human brain. The BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network will help scientists understand how the brain works and how diseases affect it. The director of the BRAIN Initiative says that neuroscience research will change for the better in the future.

BRAIN was launched by President Barack Obama. A program called the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network resulted in a number of papers. More than 100 cell types were identified by combining data on the genetic features, shapes, locations, and electrical activity of millions of cells. The network has hundreds of researchers who are working on a cell census for the rest of the mouse brain. The neuroscience community is expected to use it a lot.

The human brain has 200 billion cells and is 1000 times bigger than a mouse brain. Hongkui Zeng is the director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science which won a third of the funding. The results of the effort will be a reference for a human genome project.

Data from human brains will be added by other groups. The study of heritable changes that are passed on without changes to the DNA is known as epigenetics. The investigators are just beginning to work out the details of the study. The topic of the sampling and coverage will be a big one.

The BRAIN Armamentarium will be funded by another $36 million over the next three years. Scientists will be able to use these tools to study cell function.

BRAIN CONNECTS will make $30 million in grants early next year, and will focus on tracing wiring diagrams in mammals. The National Institute of Health has spent over $2 billion on BRAIN so far and expects to spend over $5 billion by the end of the year.