Revealing 5322 types, scientists have created the most complete map of mouse brain cells to date.
CTOnews.com, December 14 (Xinhua)-- researchers have created the most complete map of the mouse brain to date, revealing 5322 cell types.
The study involved 10 papers, nine of which were published in the journal Nature, showing the latest results of the Cell Census Alliance (BICCN).
The study was conducted by top scientists from the Allen Institute of brain Science, the Salk Institute of Biology, Harvard University, Harvard and the Baird Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It provides new insights into the structure and tissue of the mouse brain, as well as the function of individual brain cells and neural circuits.
The Cellular Census Alliance (BICCN), funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institutes of Health,NIH), was launched in 2017 with a five-year collaborative project involving 250 scientists from 45 institutions on three continents.
In the flagship paper, scientists described how to create this high-resolution map from a combination of single-cell RNA sequencing of about 4 million cells and spatial transcriptome data of about 4.3 million cells.
They proposed a map of four-level classification: 34 classes, 338 subclasses, 1201 supertypes, and 5322 cell populations.
The results show that there are unique characteristics of cell types in different brain regions, in which the dorsal region contains fewer cell types, but the diversity is higher, while the ventral region contains a large number of neuronal types which are more closely related to each other. The role of transcription factors in determining the classification of the entire brain cell type has been confirmed.
The address of related papers is attached to CTOnews.com: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03954-y
