Washington, Apr 17 (PTI) Scientists claim to have created the world”s first digital brain map that they say will help doctors better understand a range on conditions such as Alzheimer”s disease, autism and mental health disorders.
A team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science has created the computerised map after spending four years piecing together minute details from brain tissue including millions of genes, the ”Wall Street Journal” reported.
The brains were chopped up into sections to extract the RNA and find the 25,000 genes present in the human genome. Each detail was loaded into a computer to provide the exact directions from oner point of the brain to another.
In fact, the scientists hope the map will help doctors understand how the brain works and aid new discoveries in disease and treatments.
“Until now, a definitive map of the human brain at this level of detail simply hasn”t existed. For the first time, we have generated a comprehensive map of the brain that includes the underlying biochemistry,” Allan Jones from the Institute was quoted as saying.
The institute is making the atlas freely available at www.brain-map.org as a resource for scientists studying brain diseases, along with a set of computational tools to help them analyse the data for clues to conditions such as Alzheimer”s disease, autism and mental health disorders like depression.
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