The human brain is a tangled highway of wires emanating from nearly 100 billion neurons, all of which communicate across trillions of junctions called synapses. “Depressingly complex,” Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman calls it. The only way to understand this highway, says Lichtman, is to create a map.
Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, has spent several decades generating such maps, and in doing so has pioneered a field known as “connectomics.” His ultimate goal is a whole-mammalian brain map accounting for every neural connection, a so-called “connectome.”
Now, Lichtman and colleagues are embarking on a critical new step of that journey by seeking to capture synapse-level connectome data from a mouse brain at unprecedented clarity and resolution.
