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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

A milestone map of mouse-brain connectivity reveals challenging new terrain for scientists

A pioneering ‘connectomics’ collaboration has successfully reconstructed one cubic millimetre of brain tissue, but researchers are still just scratching the surface of the complexity it contains.
  1. Michael Eisenstein

    1. Michael Eisenstein is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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3D rendering of a tangle of neurons shown in different colours

Neural processes of four distinctly coloured neurons mapped by the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks project. Credit: MICrONS Explorer

A cubic millimetre is a tiny volume — less than a teardrop. But a cubic millimetre of mouse brain is densely packed with tens of thousands of neurons and other cells in a staggeringly complex architectural weave.

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Nature 628, 677-679 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01096-3

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