科學(xué)家繪制了整個(gè)老鼠大腦的地圖，結(jié)果令人著迷

科學(xué)家繪制了整個(gè)老鼠大腦的地圖，結(jié)果令人著迷

You probably don’t think about mice all that often. If you have a few of them running around your house or apartment, that’s another story, but the modern mouse plays a larger role in your life than you may know. Mice are the test subjects of the scientific world, and whether they (or we) like it or not, countless drugs and treatments eventually made it to store shelves and pharmacy counters thanks to early testing conducted on tiny little mice.

你可能不會(huì)經(jīng)常想到老鼠。如果有一些老鼠在你的房子或公寓里跑來(lái)跑去，那就另當(dāng)別論了，但是現(xiàn)代老鼠在你的生活中扮演著比你想象中更重要的角色。老鼠是科學(xué)界的試驗(yàn)對(duì)象，不管他們(或我們)喜不喜歡，無(wú)數(shù)的藥物和治療方法最終通過(guò)對(duì)小老鼠的早期試驗(yàn)，最終走上貨架和藥房柜臺(tái)。

Lab mice are bred specifically for the purpose of testing, and they are often the first animals to feel the effects of drugs used to treat everything from Alzheimer’s to back pain and everything in between. With that in mind, it makes sense that researchers would want to know as much about mouse brains as possible, and a three-year project just resulted in the most complete atlas of a mouse brain ever created.

實(shí)驗(yàn)鼠是專門(mén)為測(cè)試而培育的，它們通常是首批感受到用于治療從阿爾茨海默氏病到背痛以及介于兩者之間的所有藥物的藥物的動(dòng)物。考慮到這一點(diǎn)，研究人員希望盡可能多地了解老鼠大腦是有道理的，一個(gè)為期三年的項(xiàng)目剛剛產(chǎn)生了有史以來(lái)最完整的老鼠大腦圖譜。

The incredible amount of work that went into mapping every nook and cranny of the mouse brain is the subject of a new paper published in the journal Cell. The result of that work is a richly detailed 3D model that other scientists can use in their own research efforts. Every piece of the virtual brain model is labeled, with coordinates making it easy to explore its intricacies.

一篇發(fā)表在《細(xì)胞》雜志上的新論文指出，在繪制老鼠大腦每一個(gè)角落和縫隙的地圖方面所做的大量工作令人難以置信。這項(xiàng)工作的結(jié)果是一個(gè)豐富詳細(xì)的三維模型，其他科學(xué)家可以在自己的研究工作中使用。虛擬大腦模型的每一個(gè)部分都有標(biāo)簽，坐標(biāo)使探索其復(fù)雜性變得容易。

“The atlas was a really necessary resource that enabled the very idea of doing studies at the brain-wide level,” Nick Steinmetz, Ph.D., a scientist who recently used the mouse brain atlas for his own research, said in a statement. “When you’re recording from hundreds of sites across the brain, that introduces a new scale of investigation. You have to have a bigger view of where all the recording sites are, and the [Common Coordinate Framework] is what made that possible.”

最近將小鼠腦圖譜用于自己的研究的科學(xué)家尼克·斯坦梅茨博士在一份聲明中說(shuō)：“該圖譜是一種非常必要的資源，它使我們有了在全腦水平上進(jìn)行研究的想法。”。“當(dāng)你從大腦中的數(shù)百個(gè)地點(diǎn)進(jìn)行記錄時(shí)，這就引入了一種新的調(diào)查尺度。您必須對(duì)所有記錄點(diǎn)的位置有一個(gè)更大的了解，而[共同的坐標(biāo)框架][Common Coordinate Framework]使之成為可能。”