Get the latest tech news
Barcoding brains
Connectomics — a technique that maps physical connections between neural cells — is expensive and inefficient. E11 Bio, a non-profit research group, is designing a tool to expedite progress.
Since the emergence of visualization technologies, such as electron microscopy (EM) and functional MRI (fMRI), scientists have been able to examine healthy brains for data about everything from the movement of water molecules inside axons to the precise location of neural activation when a research subject is asked to do arithmetic in their head. Then, there is the issue of scale, as mapping the mouse connectome would require about 20 scanning electron microscopes — each costing several millions of dollars — operating simultaneously, around the clock, to achieve the necessary imaging rate of 3.2 GHz (a billion voxels per second) to complete the project in five years. To achieve this, E11 Bio synthesizes protein barcodes (short peptides with unique amino acid sequences), packages them into AAV vectors (engineered, non-harmful viruses for drug delivery), and delivers these into the brain tissue.
Or read this on Hacker News