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Scientists have long known the basic architecture of the hippocampus in four parts. What is different now is that USC scientists can show their subregions and how nerve cells interact across the structure.
It's a difference day and night, which is like seeing transmission lines and electricity poles hung in a city by day rather than fully lit up at night.
This new visualization traces neural pathways and connections with remarkable accuracy using fluorescent dyes as tracers that reveal cells, neuronal junctions and connections to the rest of the brain.
"This totally changes our understanding by combining a wiring diagram with the gene expression of the mouse hippocampus," Bienkowski said.
"We see different things, which gives us a new way of understanding how it all works together. This should have a very profound and wide impact. "
According to the National Institute on Aging, Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the elderly and the leading cause of dementia in the United States.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it records 93,500 deaths every year across the country. Its prevalence and rate increase with the aging of the population.
The USC Mouse Connectome Project is part of a larger effort funded by the National Institutes of Health to map all brain connections to understand how different structures network to regulate behavior.
Dong's research focuses on how to classify neurons based on genetics and connectivity, information that could help other researchers develop strategies to target neurons to treat diseases in humans.
This work parallels a Human Connectome project, involving 100 researchers from leading research institutes, with $ 40 million coming from the NIH, which maps brain connections to humans.
The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons, each with about 10,000 connections. Mapping this network is therefore a major challenge that involves many scientists.
USC's contribution is helping to advance broader efforts by starting with a simpler task such as mouse hippocampus research.
Source: USC
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