Author: Daniela OVADIA
Posted in neurophysiology, neuroimaging, neuroscience, research projects August 26, 2009
From: http://ovadialescienze.blogautore.espresso.repubblica . com / Posted in neurophysiology, neuroimaging, neuroscience, research projects August 26, 2009
Cause holidays have not been able to talk about it: last month the U.S. National Institutes of Health officially launched the Connettoma Human Project, funded with $ 30 million. Objective: To track, by 2015, a map of connections between brain areas in healthy human brain, to understand how information is processed. Among the other stated objectives including those of developing new drugs for neurodegenerative diseases and pain: practical results that sound more like supporting the American taxpayer to digest the amount of investment instead on a project that has all the features of basic research.
now the United States are strong supporters of the "big science", which requires to combine efforts on a specific objective to be achieved within a specified period. And to do that, obviously, you put your money on large projects, perhaps at the expense of other more modest. Worked with the genome, with the stem a bit 'less: we'll see what happens with the brain. In this case, the "guilty" by Olaf Sporn, a neuroscientist at Indiana University who in 2005 wrote an article for crying out a "navigation map" of that "unknown territory that is our brain. "
Now the project is, in part because there are only a few years the technical means to implement: in vivo imaging allows you to see the path of activation of brain areas in three dimensions and then to trace the map. Not everyone, however, are convinced that the connettoma, as defined by the NIH project, is a real step forward in our understanding of brain function, since only the trace for the highway's nerve transmission, while many scientists are now convinced that it is a level of single neuron which takes place the real work of computational brain. Connettoma also the only available, that of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, with 320 neurons, seems to confirm this. And then we humans, that we have about 100 billion neurons, to understand something of our brain we should wait a bit ', not to mention that the amount of data that should be processed to achieve a resolution that will be so small as to seem the genome project as simple as one of those big wooden puzzles that are used in kindergarten.
The optimists are hoping to come to understand how we function from the two extremes of the issue: the appearance of macroscopic connection between brain areas, thanks to the NIH project, and the painstaking work of union and made comparison of individual neuronal pathways by those who work at the microscopic level, for example the recording of individual neurons by intracranial electrodes.
Sporn and supporters of the Project Connettoma Human, however, contend that the map neuron to neuron will not be required: and have their study of complex phenomena using advanced mathematical tools to describe processes that involve a huge number of variables, many of which are unknown. "To describe an economic process certainly not going to make sure that every individual brings to the shopping cart" Sporn said.
What is certain is that the major projects of this type are a natural development fertlizzante involving the branch and also guarantee a certain saving of energy, so that, for example, duplication. Thanks to the databases of the Human Genome Project, many laboratories have found that the same gene were sequenced and combined their results, giving accelerated the process. However, calls for funding for this new company can be found at the NIH and it is worthwhile to observe carefully what will come of it.
